Bank of America Alert: You’ve Really Gone and Done It This Time Idiot

Bank of America Alert: Are You Kidding Us?

Bank of America Alert: You Already Have Three of Those

Bank of America Alert: You Could have Been a Contender

Bank of America Alert: We Feel Bad for You!!!!!!!!

Bank of America Alert: You Seriously Need to Stop Like Literally Right Now

Bank of America Alert: STOP STOP STOP

Bank of America Alert: RING RING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE IS CALLING TO BREAK UP WITH YOU LOL

Bank of America Alert: Find a New Country to Live in, Sister, Because Capitalism Ain’t for You, OBVIOUSLY

Bank of America Alert: We Saw You Walk out of Forever21 Last Weekend Without Buying Anything and We Are Wondering, Do you Think You Deserve Some Kind of Prize?

Bank of America Alert: We’ve Decided to Have You Killed

Lauren Rodrigue lives in New York.

I think it’s underreported how incredibly nice the customer service agents at Sallie Mae can be about you not paying back your loan.

Like a lot of people, I took out loans for college, and after graduation, spent my early twenties not making enough money to pay down my debts.

Eventually I took a job at an internet-y, start-up-y, new media, digital-type company where I was nicely compensated, and I started making payments on my loans. I was laid off after 18 months.

When I called Sallie Mae to break the bad news, the customer service agent sighed and told me it was OK, pumpkin—I could put the loan into deferment.

I asked how long I could do that, and I don’t remember what she said, but she certainly didn’t seem to be sweating it, so I figured I wouldn’t either. Pay it back. Don’t pay it back. Pay a little on it. Defer it. Whatever.

I hung up the phone feeling like a fucking champion. I had faced a major financial fear, and it had been resolved thanks to a mutual agreement to not worry about it.

Two years passed, and the loan collected about $15,000 in interest. I got more full-time work and started paying my Sallie Mae bill again, but it looked kinda ugly, and I began to consider deferring it again. They’d let me do it so many times before. I once deferred paying back the loan for a year simply because it was the only way I could afford to deal with the amount of late-charges I’d racked up.

Go to the website, click a few buttons, watch the amount due that month fade to zero, and chuck those payment slips in the recycling bin.

Pondering that option, the other day I logged into Salliemae.com and asked to reset my password—just how I do on the 26th of every month to pay the bill that is due on the 25th.

Right now I can pay a bill. And yet I cannot pay a bill. Paying a bill makes me upset. I get upset because seeing money that I have earned go toward something that will never go away feels futile. I looked at my outstanding balance and was struck by cold terror.

For about three months I’d been ignoring the $20 late charges and just paying the $247 due every month, thinking that the growing past-due balance would either disappear or get so big that it disappeared or… Obama? That $247, by the way, was only going to interest; it wasn’t even touching the principal.

So I called Sallie Mae to figure out what I’d done and what I could do. I started the call by telling the INCREDIBLY CHEERFUL agent that I’d been through periods when I couldn’t pay, but now I was ready to pay aggressively for however long it took to pay this thing down (hopefully not forever).

The agent told me I had set up a plan where I paid about as little as I could, but because of that, what I was paying was only going to interest, which was continuing to accrue. I could change the plan and pay more and some amount of it would go to the principal. This sounded good to me. This is what I wanted. I want to pay more, not less. But the agent kept bringing it back to paying less—so many times that it began to seem illogical to increase the monthly payment plan. I don’t think he was doing so for any other reason than he must get five billion calls every day from people who are like, oh my god, I cannot pay this bill. That’s gotta take a toll on a person.

In fairness, that’s been me for most of my relationship with Sallie Mae. But if a guy is telling you that you can lower your bill, and he seems really cool about it—shouldn’t you do that? Isn’t having a lower bill the point of life?

If I really dig in, maybe I can get the student loan bill lower than the cable bill.

It has taken me wa-a-a-ay too long to realize the difference between a loan payment and a cable bill. If you pay too much for your cable package you can cut back and get the plan that doesn’t include HBO, or you can cancel the whole thing. Don’t pay, and they cut your cable off. There’s no giant number that Time Warner has attached to your social security number that you need to pay down every month.

Loans, on the other hand, are a big number attached to your social security number, and you have to pay them back or the number gets bigger until you give them enough money to make it smaller. Buy some scratch-off tickets. Pack up your shit and disappear.

I’d figured this out with credit cards. Unlike Sallie Mae, credit card people are not very nice when you call them and ask for a lower monthly payment. Unless you can start throwing money at your credit card company in lump sums, you’re basically trapped in a cycle where your minimum payment goes only to interest forever and the amount you owe increases every month. They won’t help you. And so early on in my career as debtor, I paid off my credit cards.

But my experience with Salle Mae has been different. You can pay more to bring the debt down, but you could also pay less and bring the debt up, and they’re cool beans either way. You can also fill out a form and not pay it at all for a while.

Of course, I appreciate how nice the Sallie Mae customer service people have been to me.

I imagine they field a lot of rough calls.

I’ve definitely called them in rough times.

It’s just that there’s an institutional crack, a systemic fuck-up when no one—not even the people at Sallie Mae—acts like they expect these loans to be repaid. They’re just trying to figure out how to help you pay something toward your debt so you don’t get thrown out of a moving boxcar.

I am a person who has a lot of anxiety, embarrassment, and fear tied up in the debt that I owe. I will also admit to being kinda sorta clueless. So carrying all that baggage means that every few years when I experience a moment of clarity or something horrible happens to my ability to draw an income, I call up the owner of my student loan—and I get hosed.

You can’t get rid of student loans, not through bankruptcy or ever. If I’m allowed to grow a loan for YEARS after my education is complete, then who is the one making a living from my education? It’s not me.

Anyway, I visited the cold and logical Salliemae.com after this latest call and figured out a way to not just make payments, but to start paying the thing off. My loan will probably be paid off in ten years. At that point I will have been out of school for 23 years, which is how old I was when I had to make my first payment to Sallie Mae.

Frank Smith lives in Brooklyn.

Today in “WWYD,” one of our favorite topics: tipping. And learning to be assertive.

I’m curious about how to tip when something has been removed from your bill. I went out to breakfast with a friend and my food came out the way wrong. Without saying anything to me about it, the server kindly removed it from the bill. I left the tip for our table, and left him 40 percent, which seemed reasonable as I was leaving it, but when I calculated it more precisely at home, I realized that I only tipped two dollars more than what his tip would have been if my food were on the bill. So now I’m concerned that I low-balled him.

Do you have any guidelines for what I should do in the future? I want to be generous to someone who has been generous to me, but if I’m being honest, I guess I also don’t want to pay back the entire cost of the bad food in the form of the tip. Or would that be the best thing to do? — M.

Perhaps our readers who have worked in the service industry can help me out on this one, but it seems to me that if you really want to be generous to your server, the thing to do is, well, tip generously. Generally, when you get comped items, I think it’s a good idea to tip as if your bill wasn’t comped at all, which is what you did. Continue to dine at that restaurant. Be kind to the servers, and tip generously for the great service. That’s the best thing thing to do.

Just over a year ago, I was awarded a scholarship for students in my area of study from a community foundation in my area. The scholarship fund is supposed to give me $500 per semester for the remaining years of study. I received the award no problem during the Fall semester of ’11 and Winter of ’12. Then I took the Fall semester of ’12 off. Now I’m back in school, and there’s been no indication that I’m getting the $500 this semester.

The last time I spoke to anybody at the foundation, it was early August of last year and I was still planning to be in school that fall (and graduate in December). Since they were waiting on my enrollment certification to send me the money (I have to be in school full-time to be eligible), I figured they just didn’t send it that semester, since they never got my enrollment certification, because I didn’t enroll. I sent them my enrollment certification for this semester, once I went back to school, and assumed that would set things in motion for me receiving the award again.

But the money hasn’t come, and I’m feeling super guilty because I have been really bad at communicating with these people—I never told them I was taking the semester off—and I want the money because I’m a poor college student and I could really use it (and, you know, I was awarded this scholarship and everything). But I really don’t want to write to them and ask because the whole thing is going to be me saying, basically, “Um hey, remember me? You gave me a thousand bucks and then I kind of disappeared and didn’t send a letter to the trustees updating them on how my education was going even though I promised I would do that? Well, I’m back in school now and I would really love it if you would keep giving me money, ha ha!” I’m going to be graduating in May—finally—and I won’t have to deal with this again after this year.

Do I avoid the humiliation and never ask for the money and remain quietly resentful of them and myself? Or do I risk it and write them a nice letter and explain what was going on and see if they got my enrollment certification for this semester? The answer is SO OBVIOUS when I write out the question like that, but I am just really bad at asking for things I want, especially when I feel like it’s my fault somehow that I don’t have the thing I want. Also, how do I write this letter? — N.

So even though the answer to N.’s question is obvious and she basically answers it for herself, I wanted to post her question in full to show how helpful it can be to write out a problem you’re having and examine it on the page. Yes, clearly N. needs to get in touch with the foundation and get this all sorted out. And the easiest way to go about doing that is to pick up the phone and track down a person who can help her get this matter cleared up: “Hi, I’m a scholarship recipient and haven’t received my funding for the current semester. Can you connect me to someone who can help me?” Once you’re connected, explain the conundrum, just as you described above.

It’s hard to be assertive if you’re the shy, non-confrontational sort of person—the sort of person who over-apologizes for things. I know because I also tend to lean in this direction. But I’ve also learned that if you don’t assert yourself and ask for things, you lose out. I saved myself a lot of money by asking for more financial aid when I was in college. I asked for and negotiated a smaller broker’s fee for the apartment I currently live in and saved myself $1,000. And as Rebecca says in her Craigslist piece today, you’d be surprised by how much you can save simply by asking for a discount.

I’d skip the letter and pick up the phone. You’ll get this resolved much more quickly.

Email me your WWYD experiences to me with “WWYD” in the subject line. See previous installments.

In this installment of “WWYD,” being unhappy with a service, but not saying anything:

Last weekend I got a really bad haircut—waaay shorter and a totally different shape than the stylist and I had discussed. I’ve told many people about how unhappy I am with the cut—but not the stylist or salon. I know this is not what you’re supposed to do, but it never seemed like the right time to say anything!

During the cut, my hair was wet, and it was hard to tell exactly what was happening. I felt like we’d had a good conversation beforehand about what I wanted, and I didn’t want to him to feel criticized or judged while he was doing his job. By the time I REALLY suspected that the stylist was cutting off too much, it’s not like he could re-attach it, so I sat in silent panic.

It looked awful when he finished, but I still paid for the cut & gave a normal tip. It seemed silly to complain or dispute the payment after the fact, because nothing could be done (other than making it even shorter!). Besides, I hadn’t spoken up during the cut—when I was a waitress, it was hard to take customer complaints seriously if the customer had eaten the entire meal before voicing his/her dissatisfaction! So, what should I have done? What can I do now? — S.

The only haircuts I’ve regretted getting were ones I paid $10 for, and my response was simply to run away, never to return. Now, I’m a working adult who can afford to spend more than $10 on a haircut, and have been going to my place for the last six years. I’m treated well—the owner gives me a big, warm hello every time I go in, and I’ve had positive experiences with each of the stylists I’ve had there over the years.

At the end of each cut, the stylist always asks me what I think about it it, and though it’s usually positive, I’ve always said something when I felt it wasn’t what I wanted: “I think we could go shorter,” for example, or, “The back looks funny to me.” And the stylist has always done his/her best to make the correction. Salons want you to be happy with your cuts, because if you’re happy with your cuts, you’ll come back—hopefully for many more years. I think it’s clear to you what you should have done (spoken up, rather than sitting in silent panic), and the thing you can do now, and the thing that I would do, is go back to the salon and say something (as politely as possible, of course).

Let’s go back to your example: Would you take your customer seriously if she were a regular diner who ate at your restaurant for years, and she said something? If she had said, “I’m sorry, I know I should have said something when I noticed it, but the salmon I had was really overdone”? I’m sure you would have also liked her to say something when she noticed it, but you’d also want to find some way to make sure she didn’t walk out unhappy. Customers become regulars when they’re happy with both the product and customer service. (See this comment from September from DeepOmega.)

From Logan, as told to Mike:

When I was in high school, I went to a salon where my mom was a regular and knew the owner, and I ended up getting a haircut that I hated. When I told my mom about it, she took me back there so I could let them know, and they ended up letting me get my hair cut again for free. At first, they asked me to see the same stylist so he could fix his mistakes, but I told them I was too embarrassed to see him again, so they let me see another person, who ended up making my hair look better. END OF STORY.

Can you go back and let them know you’re unhappy with the cut? Yes, especially if you’re a regular, they’ll likely want to figure out a way to make things right—if not offering to fix it there, like with what happened to Logan, perhaps offering a discount or to comp your next haircut. And if they don’t offer to do anything, well, it is your right as a customer to not have to visit that establishment again if you don’t want to.

Email me your WWYD experiences to me with “WWYD” in the subject line. See previous installments.

I moved to Sweden two years ago to go to graduate school. I graduated this past June, and by late July, I’d failed to find a job in either Sweden or the U.S. (I’d acquired Swedish citizenship through my mother, a Swedish immigrant to the U.S.) My girlfriend was working at a bakery on the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, where she has spent her last two summers with about fifteen of her friends, all Swedish students. By working two-and-a-half months in Lofoten, they could avoid working during the school year and, more importantly, avoid taking student loans.

She offered to find me a cleaning job, telling me if I worked in Norway, I’d become “rich like a troll.” I’d always thought it was the dwarfs and goblins that were rich, but I wasn’t about to quibble. Facing the reality of undergraduate student loans and the nigh-on uselessness of an M.A. in the humanities, I ate my pride, packed my bags, and endured the 30-hour train ride up to Lofoten.

During my month in Lofoten, I cleaned suites at a luxury hotel, a rather garish place whose shag carpet rugs, glass-walled bathrooms, and semi-nude portraits of a former employee gave the rooms a vaguely porn-set feel. The exterior approximated the appearance—and the interior the heat—of a giant greenhouse. I wore a smock, carried toilet-bowl cleaner at all times, and became really good at making beds. Some evenings, I walked across town to work at the shabbier of its two sister hotels, the local Best Western, which the Scandinavians pronounced “Best Veas-tern” in their singsong accents while correcting my American pronunciation. It advertised itself as “an art hotel,” a designation it had conferred upon itself by decorating the halls with napkin-quality Munch prints. I waited on busloads of tourists from Germany, Switzerland, and Norway, serving them whale stew and over-priced fish casserole. (Despite the enormous local fishing industry, the hotel used frozen fish from China.) For my services, I made the equivalent of $25 an hour. After 9 p.m., $27. On Sundays, almost $29.

As an American, it is bizarre to think of modern Sweden, so often lauded as a paragon of social and economic stability, as coughing up migrant workers. Stranger still is that the Swedes migrate to Norway, which has always been regarded as Sweden’s little brother. Often at war, Sweden forced Norway into an uneven union for most of the 19th century. Though politically independent of Sweden for over one hundred years, Norway has remained culturally subordinate to its larger, more-established neighbor. Norwegians watch Swedish television, listen to Swedish music, and read Swedish books. Before the Norwegian translation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was released, the original Swedish version was the best-selling book in Norway. But in the last 25 years, Norway has added workers to the list of things it imports from Sweden.

In the eighties, Norway became rich off of oil. Its sovereign wealth fund is currently valued at about 600 billion dollars. From 1999-2009, average Norwegian family saw an increase of almost 100,000 NOK, or about $17,000. With its population of only five million, Norway needed to import laborers and service workers for its exploding economy. I once hitched a ride from a retired sailor, and after running out of ways to compliment his RV, I asked him how Norway had changed over the years. He thought Norway had it too good now. As a young man, he’d been at sea for over a year at a time, whereas “the young people today don’t want to work at all. It’s good that we have the Swedes.”

Current estimates of the number of Swedes living and working in Norway hover between 80,000 and 100,000. In Oslo alone, it’s thought that there are 50,000 Swedes, which is about 10 percent of the city’s population. Most of these are service workers. Indeed, the Swede-as-service worker has become something of a stereotype in Norway. The 2010 rap hit “Partysvenske” is an extended mockery of male Swedish migrant workers, who are portrayed as effete drunks who invade Oslo’s nightlife. At one point, the rappers—Jaa9 & Onklp—chide, “Make a mojito, do what you do well.” The condescension towards Swedish migrant workers was prevalent enough for Norwegian television to produce a mocumentary series titled Swedes Are People. There’s a weird power dynamic at play, with both groups exhibiting a sort of passive aggressive bitterness towards the other. For their part, Norwegians seem eager to buck Swedish cultural influence and assert their economic dominance. Speaking to the New York Times in 2007, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo put it rather well:

“When I was young, Swedes had whiter teeth, clearer skin, Abba, and Bjorn Borg. We had lots of fish, and not much more. Today, Swedes have been cut down to size. And I would say that many Norwegians enjoy the fact that so many Swedes are here doing menial jobs.”

When the Norwegian cross-country skier Petter Northug beat his Swedish rival across the line at the 2011 World Championships, he used opportunity to taunt Sweden about the low value of the Swedish currency. The Swedish media, on the other hand, laments the fact that Swedes are reduced to literally peeling bananas in Norway—albeit for about $23 an hour.

Over the past ten years, Norway has taken in more foreign labor than any other European country. While Norway takes in plenty of laborers from Eastern Europe, Swedes are easier to employ because of the similarities in language and culture. The near-interchangeability of Swedish and Norwegian makes Swedes an attractive option for jobs at cafes and bars. I’m told that many Norwegian employers actually prefer to hire Swedes to Norwegians, saying Swedes have a stronger work ethic and commitment to customer-service. (If that’s true, it says more about Norwegians than Swedes; I spent the better part of my time in Sweden feeling as though I was inconveniencing bartenders and servers.) Further, because of an arrangement between the Nordic countries, Swedes don’t need a work permit or visa to stay in Norway.

If there are incentives for Norwegians to hire Swedes, the incentives are even greater for the Swedes. Norway has higher wages, shorter workweeks, and Swedes are granted a tax break for their first two years. The Norwegian krone is also worth more than the Swedish krona. As I write this, the exchange rate is 1 Norwegian krone to 1.16 Swedish krona. Earlier this year it was about 1.2, and in 2009 it was at 1.3. Swedes can go to Norway for a few months, or even a few years, live cheaply, and return to Sweden like Vikings returning from a season of pillaging. Indeed, it’s been estimated that 90% of Swedes return to their homeland within five years.

The stereotype of Swedes in Norway is that they live in dirty “collectives,” packing as many people into a house as possible. We did little to mitigate this stereotype. While some of our friends lived in the hotel where they worked, we lived in shabby two-story summer rental, nine of us in total, though when we hosted friends from Sweden, there were as many as 15 in the house. In Lofoten, the service work is connected to tourism. Swedes are in demand as seasonal workers for the summer. We worked as cleaners, hotel reception clerks, baristas, and cooks. One housemate—the German boyfriend of one of the Swedes—worked as a tour-guide for a cruise-ship company. Elsewhere in Norway, Swedes find summer work filling in for vacationing Norwegians. A Swedish medical student I know worked as a sort of CNA at a dementia ward. The work could be difficult, but he often worked nights, where he sat at the nursing station reading books and watching movies while being paid overtime rates of almost 300NOK ($52) an hour.

Every morning, I biked the 30 minutes to work, the mountains pressing on me from the left, the sea from the right. Sometimes I’d work alone, but generally I’d be working with one of my housemates. After stopping by the front desk to pick up a list of rooms to be cleaned, we went down to the basement to don our grey smocks and name tags. (Martin, my housemate, had made himself one which read “Bruce Wayne,” which prompted one earnest Norwegian to ask if he was American.) We restocked one cart with cleaning supplies and then used a chef’s knife—which we stored sheathed in a copy of The Invention of Murder that a guest had left behind—to cut open bags of sheets and towels, which we then piled high on our other cart. Then we started cleaning the vacated rooms in a frenzy to get them ready by the 3 p.m. check-in time.

The suites that had been vacated were often marked by a vague loneliness, that kind that settles like dust in a house the morning after a grand party. The empty bottle of wine and two glasses sitting on the table, the remains of the shrimp bought from the boat docked outside the hotel, a coffee press still warm from breakfast—each room was like a still life waiting to be painted or a crime scene waiting to be investigated. Sometimes the rooms were unused, which meant the guest(s) was totally decadent or had gone home with someone else. Both options were foreign to the Midwestern Evangelical sensibilities I inherited from my childhood, though I was always happy for one less room to clean. More often, though, the rooms were scattered with the debris of Too Much Fun. In hotels, people become like adolescents, both in their brazen self-absorption and excess and in their assurance—in this case, warranted—that someone else would clean up after them. One guest filled a bathtub full of seaweed, which my colleague then had to clean up. Another guest had the decency, before checking out, to warn the same colleague that he’d somehow cut himself; the sheets, and the towels were all splattered in blood. The tourist’s mantra of “I’m on vacation,” combined with some alcohol, does away with most inhibitions; “I paid for it” excuses a plethora of sins. And paid they had. To rent a room at this hotel would cost 1500 NOK ($260). The problem was, you might end up sharing common area and kitchenette with people you didn’t know. To rent out the whole suite was 2500 NOK ($430). Probably 70% of the guests were Norwegians. The rest were wealthy tourists from The Continent and the occasional Americans.

A vacated room was supposed to take no more than 20 minutes for a single housekeeper. A whole suite, about an hour. The bathtub filled with seaweed took an hour to clean. Smock-pockets filled with cleaning spray and rags, we descended upon the rooms, dusting, wiping, changing sheets, and folding fresh towels like origami. If there were dirty dishes, we did those. The cleaning spray dried out our sinuses and gave us bloody noses. In the bathrooms, there was always a steady supply of hair in bathtubs and the sporadic used condom. When it came time to fold the loose end of the toilet paper into a triangle—apparently nothing says luxury like having someone attend to the aesthetics of your ass-wiping experience—I had to remind myself I was making $25 an hour.

If the whole suite had been vacated, we would brew some coffee and drink it on the suite’s balcony, a view of the mountains and sea so sublime that we forgot we were wearing sweaty smocks stuffed with cleaning spray. More than the money, these views—and the ability to go hiking, swimming, and fishing after work—are what made the work bearable for my housemates and me.

After cleaning the vacated rooms, we moved on to the rooms that still had guests. Sometimes, the guests were present when we cleaned. Even if they were kind—I once received about a $10 tip for fixing a curtain—there was something demeaning about this. If they were rude, it became almost too much to handle. After some angry Norwegians complained about one of my colleagues cleaning—”We paid too much for this to not be cleaned perfectly!”—I had to re-clean their suite then, just to make sure they were appeased, wash their dishes while they sat on their balcony smoking, pretending I did not exist. On their dining table, there was a book on how to find peace by communicating with your pets. In moments like these, it wasn’t comforting to think of the money I was making. It was comforting to know that I wasn’t confined to a lifetime of service work.

While my Swedish housemates constantly complained about the inefficiency of Norwegian society and how backwards the culture was, I found most Norwegians to be delightful people who were laid-back, even bubbly, in comparison to Swedes. My favorite of them was the cook I worked with at the Best Western, a delightful local woman of Valkyrian stature who had cooked there for over 20 years. When Ellen wasn’t foisting food on me, she was asking me about the poverty and inequality in America or making fun of Sweden. When she found out I wasn’t actually a Swede but an American, she asked why I’d learned Swedish instead of Norwegian. She often served Jell-O for dessert—Norwegians apparently love Jell-O—and couldn’t get over the fact that most Swedes hate the stuff. “What’s wrong with these fools?” she asked me. “Do you Americans like Jell-O?”

“College kids do,” I said, and proceeded to explain the concept of Jell-O shots as Ellen’s eyes grew wide with excitement. She decided she would make Jell-O shots for the personnel party for the three sister hotels, an end of the summer thank-you from the hotel’s husband and wife ownership team.

Which is how I found myself holding a watermelon filled with green rum-infused Jell-O in front of a shuttle-bus full of color-coordinated Scandinavians, the Swedes painting their faces the color of their teams and the Norwegians singing the early-nineties Norwegian hit, “I’m not sick, just Swedish.” When we arrived at the hotel owners’ cottage, a beautiful little summer home on the sea, we were met by the owners dressed as judges, draped in black sheets and wearing black beanies pinning down dust mop heads, makeshift judicial wigs. (The husband’s beanie was emblazoned with a bikini-clad woman holding a chainsaw and the text “Swedish Psycho.”)

Scandinavians, awkward and bureaucratic people, love organized fun. Parties have themes, and usually there are games or trivia. Even the drinking is orderly: overdone speeches followed by toasts and later, drinking songs with shots of schnapps. For the personnel party, we had been organized into four competing teams (red, blue, green, yellow) and each team given some money to prepare a course (appetizer, fish, meat, dessert). The husband-owner raised his glass in a toast to the employees for their help, then raised it again to acknowledge the help of the Swedes and to toast their country. Out of the 20-or-so employees, there were only five Norwegians.

I’ll spare you the details of the dinner except to say the Swedes groaned at the sight of the Jell-O, but never ones to turn down free alcohol, ate it anyway. The judges gave it terrible scores. But it didn’t matter. When the judges announced the winner, I was in the outhouse and emerged to find one of my teammates holding out a gold-foiled chocolate medallion.

Returning to the cabin, I looked around at the drunken Swedes and Norwegians, arms around each other, singing each country’s drinking songs; they had become indistinguishable, blurring into one Nordic mass.

Bewildered by the Scandinavian solidarity and unaccustomed to drinking in front of employers, I walked down to the beach to sit by the sea. The number of tourists was dwindling, and in the coming days the people in our group would begin to migrate back to Sweden. It was 11:30, and the dusk would soon be replaced by darkness, a change which my girlfriend would herald as the return of the stars, the signal that it was time to return to Sweden. As I stared out at the sea, my medallion still dangling from my neck, I heard a retching off to my right. My co-worker Martin—”Bruce Wayne”—was puking.

David Michael is the editor of Wunderkammer, a web-based journal of cultural criticism. He lives in Sweden, where he rents a room from some Dominican friars in exchange for brewing and gardening services

If you ever find yourself staying in Room 1212 of a New York City hotel, Jacob Tomsky’s “Heads in Beds” suggests that you think back to the way you behaved while checking in. Were you rude to the front desk? Cheap to the bellman? Yammering nonstop on your cellphone? Asking irritating questions about the gym and the ice machines?

Mr. Tomsky, a self-taught expert in the passive-aggressive tricks of hotel workers, says that a Room 1212 may not happen by accident. It may be assigned spitefully, because it is a torture chamber where the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. It is well known to hotel management that guests dialing the New York area code 212 often hit 1-212, not knowing they must first dial 9 to get a local outside line.

As someone who enjoys hearing people dish about the hospitality industry, I am probably going to pick up this book. I mean, there’s this: “…he explains how to watch free movies, steal the entire contents of a minibar, avoid a cancellation charge even when canceling hours after the room rental started, and generally win any argument you choose to pick with a hotel employee.” Expect a future post about this, you guys!!!

The Internet has dramatically changed the way people access information. Once predominantly free, the Internet is changing as well, as content providers increasingly charge for access. Paying to access information has potentially farreaching social, political, and economic consequences. Results suggest that at least over the relatively short timeframe of the current study, participants exhibited strong psychological reactance, particularly those in the inequity cluster. Participants generally did not plan to purchase a digital subscription and were remarkably consistent in their subsequent behavior. They decreased their visits, devalued the NYT, and frequently planned to exploit loopholes to bypass the paywall or switch providers altogether…

When participants were provided with a compelling justification for the paywall—that the NYT was likely to go bankrupt without it—their support and willingness to pay increased. In contrast, when participants were provided with a justification that emphasized financial stability, their support and willingness to pay decreased. It is possible that this latter condition simply confirmed participants’ sense that the paywall was unfair, rather than providing a compelling profit justification. Either way, results suggest that content providers could benefit from more thorough attempts to justify price structures.

When The New York Times announced it was going to throw up a paywall, I had the minority reaction of, “This makes sense. Reporters have to get paid somehow!” Of course, my thoughts were colored by the facts that I was working in journalism, and had friends who worked at the Times who were subsequently laid off due to cutbacks. But this study about consumer psychology behind what happens when you ask people to pay for something that used to be free (and how you frame it) is fascinating. But the Times appears to have made it out alive. Billfold paywall anyone? (Haha, just kidding, never would we ever.)

I know this video is supposed to be how funny it is for someone to try to use an old coupon from an unopened VHS copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which I loved watching when I was a kid), but for me, it’s all about that manager. That manager is terrific. I’d like to give that manager a hug. [via]

USAA, the big insurance company for current and former members of the armed services, is a good example of the first group. The robosystem asks only that you pick by number, the subject about which you are calling (e.g, “1″ for auto insurance; “2″ for home insurance). A service representative comes on the line quickly, answers questions cheerfully, and is respectful of the caller (and does not use the faux chumminess of addressing the caller by his/her first name).

Hertz is an example of the streamlined approach. It wasn’t always this easy, but today you can dial their “800″ number, book a rental car in a distant city, get the cost and your confirmation number all without human intervention and all within about three minutes.

The American Spectator looks at which companies are doing it right when it comes to telephone customer service, but as some of us know from experience, sometimes, it’s just easier to tweet at a company’s twitter handle and wait for someone to get back to you.

In case you’re interested in another discussion about tipping (and clearly, we are all interested in discussions about tipping), Marginal Revolution has a discussion about how people tip when they order food online using websites like Seamless. The tipping question here is: Do you pre-tip online with your credit card? Or do you wait for the delivery to come and tip in cash? (Cash seems like to be the more common answer.)