Keeping in touch with Facebook

10. I moved from America to Israel in 2004, leaving behind my entire family and almost every friend I’d ever known. Though I didn’t get a Facebook account until 2005, I’ve been using it daily for the past five years to stay in touch with friends and relatives. Facebook makes it extremely inexpensive and highly efficient to get out important news about myself and to find out important news about other people with whom I never was very close. At the same time, it has never replaced traditional means of communication like telephone calls; nor should it.

Business networking with Facebook

9. LinkedIn is there and it does a fine job, but work is only one part of my life and there’s no chance for a prospective employer or client to get to know me by my LinkedIn page. I add my coworkers as Facebook friends and I’ll do the same for my clients. If they don’t accept me, I don’t mind at all, but I think they’ll want to get a better understanding of who I am and what I like, to the extent that information on Facebook supplements my real personality.

Photo sharing on Facebook

8. I understand that Facebook is now the world’s biggest photo-sharing site. There are others, like Flickr and Picasa, that have lots of features and are more professional, and more serious solutions like installing Gallery on your own domain. But for ease of tagging, getting photos to lots and lots of people – but not to random strangers – and sheer simplicity, sharing photos with Facebook makes perfect sense.

Connecting with new friends on Facebook

7. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been out and met someone or a few people, but only gotten first names. In the old days, meeting someone and speaking for a few minutes meant that I’d either have to ask for a telephone number to continue the conversation, with might seem a little too forward (and I don’t enjoy talking on the telephone very much) or attempting to follow up through a friend-of-a-friend, which could be cumbersome (I’ve never been comfortable meeting someone and then asking for an email address). It’s now extremely handy to use Facebook to connect with a new contact, even given just a first name and a mutual friend. This might be to continue a discussion about some interesting issue, to finish tagging a photo, to pass along information about a job or an apartment or just to stay in touch in the future. It’s clean, it’s easy and it works.

Using Facebook ads

6. Recently, while looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, I used Facebook ads to get the word out and drive people to read my message that I was willing to pay a NIS 3500 finder’s fee for information leading to me renting an apartment. A very large percentage of the site’s traffic was generated by these Facebook ads, leading to several actionable tips. My somewhat creative use of Facebook ads was profiled in an article in TheMarker, the business section of Haaretz, but in fact I believe that I was using Facebook’s advertising platform in exactly the way it was designed and for exactly its purpose. Gone are the days when ad campaigns cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just to plan and start. I set $10 daily limits for my ads and didn’t have any knowledge of the system beyond what’s available in Facebook’s own FAQs. It’s so easy to use Facebook ads, I could almost train my dog to use them.

Facebook’s privacy settings

5. Complaints about how Facebook sets up its privacy settings are a dime a dozen, but I challenge anyone to come up with another comparable web service that gives its users more powerful, granular control over their information than Facebook does. You can choose exactly who gets to see every little thing you do on Facebook or set global settings and just stick with them. True, they change their privacy options all the time and true, it gets pretty confusing, but it’s getting confusing because it’s getting more detailed and more complex, which is a good thing. And the bottom line is that no information is available about you that you don’t put on Facebook in the first place: if you want to have a profile with just your first name, last initial and favorite television shows, you can do that. This isn’t to say that privacy isn’t a big concern. It is, but it’s also crazy to complain that Facebook is spreading your information every which way if you don’t use Facebook’s own options to control who sees your information.

Remembering people’s details with Facebook

4. Whenever someone I know travels, I always ask for a postcard to add to my collection. “But what’s your address?” they always ask. And I always say: “It’s on my Facebook page.” When I meet someone who asks for my phone number, I could recite the ten digits or write them down, but it’s a hell of a lot easier just to give my Facebook username – which, conveniently, is the same as my first name. When someone wants to know my birthday to wish me a happy birthday – it’s there, and it even reminds my friends and family on Facebook when my birthday is approaching. I have a Birthdays calendar in iCal too, so I can see when important birthdays are coming… but there are hundreds more birthdays in my Facebook account.

Everyone is on Facebook

3. As often happens, Farhad Manjoo said it best: “There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook… it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant [and mobile phones]… Facebook is now at that same point – whether or not you intend it, you’re saying something by staying away.” What does it say to me when I meet someone who doesn’t have Facebook? Something like: I don’t want to stay in touch with you. Or perhaps: Please leave me alone. Or even: Community is not important to me. These are perfectly valid sentiments, but if you do want to stay in touch, if you don’t want to be left alone, if community does matter to you, then you’ll find a way to use the tool that’s expected of you.

Facebook gets better all the time

2. I’m actually ambivalent about Facebook’s progress and I include this one even though, while I think it’s true that Facebook does get better all the time, it also gets worse. I miss the days when Facebook was mainly about networks (and then groups) and I think becoming a “fan” of a “page” is lame, which is why I’ve never done it. I think most Facebook applications like the Farmville thing and the Mafia Wars thing are complete crap, which is why I’ve never used them (and why I’ve blocked them from spamming me). At the same time, Facebook’s integration with the wider web is very cool and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities – who knows, maybe one day Facebook will be the next Google, the first stop for people who want to find something on the internet. And where else on the internet do people join a site with their real names (first and last) and real pictures, one account per person? Facebook could be the long sought source for online micropayments, one-click identity verification without credit cards, etc, etc.

It’s a pain in the ass to quit Facebook

1. This is in response to Dan Yoder’s point three: “Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.” It seems circular to me that it’s hard to close your Facebook account would be an argument for why you should close your Facebook account, but I understand that many people see it that way. Just ask yourself: is it really worth it? Facebook is entertaining, useful, efficient, free, generally a good idea to use and possibly will be even more essential in the future. If you don’t like making your information public, limit the amount of information you share. You don’t even have to give a real last name to use Facebook; you don’t have to use your normal email address; you don’t have to join your company’s network or accept your boss’s friend request. Is it really worth canceling your account for the vaguest and lamest reasons? Nope. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and keep the damn account open.

10 Reasons NOT to Delete Your Facebook Account is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Most available apartments in Tel Aviv never get advertised. They go to people’s friends, family members, coworkers or even casual acquaintances. Actually, most things work that way in Israel, and it makes life here very difficult for immigrants like me, since just by having fewer friends and virtually no family, there aren’t as many people who can help me.

I’m hoping that everyone I know will take note of my very genuine offer of a serious finder’s fee – one month’s rent, up to NIS 3500 – and make my apartment hunt their business by taking it to their friends, and their friends to their friends, and so forth. The site has been live for only a day or so, and already some people I don’t even know have tweeted the particulars of what I’m looking for in an apartment – so I do have a hunch that this could work.

Find My Tel Aviv Apartment is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

My contention is, and has been on many occasions, that chicken shnitzel is the authentic Israeli cuisine because it is the only notable dish invented by Jews in Israel that’s culturally accessible to all of us, from all our different backgrounds. More than just an adaptation of a Mitteleuropan food to Middle Eastern reality (most of us don’t eat pork, and veal was cost prohibitive in this poor country), chicken shnitzel is an innovative and daring use of chicken, bread crumbs and frying oil.

And how we love it! We Israelis so love chicken shnitzel that, somehow through affection or laziness, “skinless, boneless chicken breast” was renamed “shnitzel” in Hebrew. That’s right, if you walk into a butcher or supermarket in Israel and want to buy some boneless, skinless chicken breast, you’ll need to ask for “shnitzels.”

Falafel and hummus are both wonderful foods and I love them, but they are regional Levantine fare that belong to a deeper shared cultural heritage of the entire eastern Mediterranean. By no means are they Arab foods: more accurately, Arabic-speakers today have inherited falafel and hummus by virtue of having lived in this region for a millennium and a half, but we Jews are as much a part of that tradition as anyone else.

Update: the question has been taken up in the Jewish Chronicle, which means another mention for me.

Chicken Shnitzel is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Beach weather is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

I’ve found it difficult trying to review this year, not because nothing happened or because too much happened, but because what happened doesn’t really apply itself to review.

The company for which I worked was sold to another company and my job got moved in January to the Ra’anana industrial zone. I really, really, really did not want to join the company in the move. I looked for a new job, but didn’t find one on acceptable terms, and then decided to de-prioritize finding a new job and continue at least for a while commuting to Ra’anana. But the management of the new company had very little use for me, and I was asked several times over the course of a few months to quit. Finally I did quit, but I tried to do so in a way that reflected positively on me. It wasn’t easy, but I’m proud of it.

My new job – actually my first step toward a real career – involves internet marketing. And it’s in central Tel Aviv, which means I can walk to and from work whenever I want (I usually walk home). It’s a small internet startup. I like it and I’m happy.

Sharav is doing swell. I have worked really hard to train him. He still has a lot to learn, but even now I think he’s probably one of the best-trained dogs in Tel Aviv. All the time I get compliments from other dog owners and from random passersby about how well he behaves without a leash in public. People are always asking me if I trained him myself and if I’m a professional dog-trainer. Also, he’s exceptionally friendly and never barks!

Of course, I also get negative comments. Sometimes Sharav does something wrong and I’ll need to yell at him or pin him to the ground (establishing physical dominance is absolutely the first step toward teaching a dog anything, and there’s no reason it can’t be done safely and painlessly), and someone will come up to me and accuse me of having a violent temper, which is manifestly false. Or I’ll not let him tug when we’re walking with his choker collar, and some jerk will try to explain to me that I shouldn’t use a choker because because because because because because because. Approximately ten times out of ten, these people own dogs with terrible behavior problems caused by total lack of discipline because they saw on television that you should surround a dog with positivity and let him make sense out of life by himself. Go figure.

I’m in the middle of my third year living in the same apartment, which is longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere, except my parents’ house where I grew up. At this point I very much hoped to be living without a roommate, and for a time that seemed very possible, but in the end it didn’t work out financially and I’m now living not only with a roommate, but with two (they’re in the military and share a bedroom). I’m friends with both of them, and they are good roommates so far, so I’m happy with it. They also bring a lot of people over, and that’s a nice thing, because this is a fantastic apartment and it’s worth enjoying it.

I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but stay tuned for more news about my long saga with NYU.

Finally, for anyone who was ever being kept updated on my health, it’s pretty much the same now as it was, except that I’ve been diagnosed with sleep apnea and am getting fitted for a C-PAP next month. I can’t wait.

I try to get to Jerusalem about once a month, but maybe I’ll be able to go more frequently now that my job is in central Tel Aviv and I have roommates who are willing and able to help with Sharav.

Oh yeah, four years without a television and I’m finally getting one soon. I am psyched!

It’s been an interesting year. In a way, it’s been successful – the more time I live here, the more comfortable I come, the deeper my roots grow into the Tel Aviv pavement, and the easier it is to see my future unfolding here. But I’ve also had some roots ripped up – some very dear friends, people on whom I depended and who were like extended family to me, have left Israel recently and over the course of the past year for more promising or more fruitful lives in North America. Whether they stay in America temporarily or permanently, it will not be easy to adjust to an Israel without them.

Year Four in Review is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

As many people know, my job moved to Ra’anana last January, and as some people know, I’ve given notice to my employer that I’ll be leaving, at the end of next week, for a new job in Tel Aviv. The new job is also in the internet industry, and I’ll be working in internet marketing. I’m very excited for the opportunity and finally to be rid of this accursed daily commute.

Sharav is almost a year and a half old! Last week he switched from puppy food to adult dog food and seems to be enjoying it a lot – so for everyone who was concerned that he looked emaciated, maybe he’ll put on some weight now. He also has a new pillow for his crate and is going to be moving soon from my bedroom to the laundry room / dining room / second balcony area, as soon as I manage to stack my newish washing machine and new dryer on top of one another to free up some space.

I’ve been re-watching the entire Sopranos series, episode by episode as I acquire each one. It’s my third time watching most of it, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten stale or even remotely less interesting than it was the first time around. I even have found myself excitedly noticing more details now than I did before, plus I’m keeping much, much better track of all the characters’ arcs. Right now I’m in the beginning of the second half of season six, the episode where Tony and Paulie go down to Florida.

My roommate Cori had to move out, so now I am sans roommate and looking for one: non-smoking, long- or short-term, preferably female, dog-friendly, between 20 and 30.

I’ve recently finished Crime and Punishment, The Plague, and the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago. I’ve started a few others but left them unfinished. Right now I’m reading Heart of Darkness.

On my long commutes to and from Ra’anana, I’ve turned to podcasts, since I have a difficult time reading while hurdling down the highway. Slate’s gabfests have been fantastic, as have Philosophy Bites, 12 Byzantine Emperors, and Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Actually, I’m able now to listen to podcasts because I picked up a new iPod the last time I was in America, thanks either to the weak dollar or to the strong shekel, one or the other. It’s 160 gigs , which means I can say with some certainty that the battery will probably die before I run out of space on the drive. In the mean time, I’m using the extra space as backup for essential files from my computer (and I might even partition the iPod and put a bootable copy of my computer’s hard drive right on it). Also thanks in part to the currency exchange issue, I have an iPhone now, which kicks ass, notwithstanding all the ways that it doesn’t (at least it’s the best phone I’ve ever used). And I have a new camera, finally DSLR, a Canon Digital Rebel. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I’m slowly getting to know and understand using it more and more. I’ll eventually/soon put some of my pictures back online in a gallery.

In the nearly four years I’ve been living in Israel, my family has visited four times (once without my father and once without my brother), plus many friends have come here and stayed with me. But no friends came to Israel specifically to visit me until last month, when Margot came for almost two weeks. I took five days off of work and we rented a car and traveled around the country. It was awesome to see and taste Israel as new, with someone who never had done so before. To everyone in America who hasn’t visited me yet, I invite you to submit your plans for my approval.

That is all.

Where I be (at) is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

I actually did sit down and contemplate the past year on the third anniversary of my Aliyah, thought a lot about it, such as what I did and what happened to me, my decisions, the decisions that other people made that affected me, and so on. This was another year of very diverse experiences, and another year that ended in a way that I could not have predicted at its outset.

In explaining it, I think Year Three is best split into two half-years.

At the beginning of my third year in Israel, I was in a tough situation. I knew almost no one in Tel Aviv, my position at work was very awkward – and I was working for a company that I despised. I was sad to see the door closed on a personal relationship that had meant a lot to me, and I felt a lot of regret for many aspects of that whole fiasco.

So, I did what I could to turn the situation around. I let my former friend go, once and for all, without airing grievances childishly, while doing my best not to burn bridges and to leave the door open for any potential future contact. I quit my awful job in the shitty, unethical company and came to work in a company that is not perfect, but really treats people decently. In many ways, my new job was a step down for me. The work was somewhat less interesting and demanded far less from me creatively. The pay was far lower. The commute was twice as long. But the people were friendly, and I’m happy to be working in the same company now.

I took that specific job because I planned to go back to university, and I needed a flexible schedule with shifts. I indeed started at the IDC in October and for a while worked and went to school like crazy – four days a week on campus, five days a week in the office. At the end of my first semester, I decided not to continue at IDC, and this is where my first half-year ends: another turning point.

I then went to visit America for about a week, and when I returned to Israel, I could have decided to start over again with another new job and another new whatever. But I stayed and began working a lot – around 220 hours per month. After a few months, I adopted the dog and have really enjoyed being a pet owner. I also started dating more frequently.

Good things have happened for me at the job. I no longer feel like I have to work wildly insane hours just to make ends meet at the end of the month. I’m slowly beginning to do some more interesting things. I know some people in and around Tel Aviv – and some of them are my friends.

I miss Jerusalem and the life I left behind there a lot. It’s a shame that visiting Jerusalem has been very difficult (because of my hectic schedule and also because bringing the dog wouldn’t be easy) and that friends from the Jerusalem area almost never visit Tel Aviv. These are things that I would like to change, but I am basically comfortable and satisfied here. I am a bit surprised that I am where I am at the end of my third year, but it’s a fact that I’m already dashing into Year Four without even a thought to where it will lead me.

where did three years go? is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

On the one hand, I had Christians suddenly conscious, all around me, that Jews exist. This was in general contrast to the unspoken Christian-Jewish agreement, in force during 11 months of the year, for Jews to be as invisible as possible in America. Since Jews in America mostly see themselves through Christian American eyes, this has a big impact on our self-perception. I’m sure we can all share stories of great conversations, but here is one of my favorites: once some friends and I were asked during Xmas season (or perhaps by then it was already being called Holiday season), “Are ya’ll Christian or Hanukan?” And of course we replied, “Hanukan – we celebrate beer.” I also used to have people asking me left and right, year after year during December, What does Hanukah celebrate? and the favorite question that I got at least once every December, What’s the difference between Jews and Christians? / What do Jews believe in? / Jews don’t accept J*sus as the Messiah, right? As a child and young adult, if I hadn’t been so downright freaked out by that sort of attention, I would have loved it.

And on the other hand, we Jews had to come up with some sort of narrative about the Hanukah narrative, which is to say that we either had to go all out celebrating it, turning it part and parcel into the Jewish Xmas, or we had to justify not doing so. The explanation that Hanukah is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar is decidedly weak when it’s one of the few Jewish holidays that most Jewish kids even know about. Besides the oil-miracle story being totally lame and obviously made up, the whole thing (at least the real elements of it) is very un-PC. Look: you’ve got a family that’s part of an hereditary priesthood waging a minority-supported war against the founders of western civilization in order to impose a theocracy over a proto-ethno-national entity. Exilic Judaism despises all of this, every aspect of it, not to mention all the parts about the Temple, which was totally glossed over in Sunday School … because, and I think this should be clear to everyone, if they’d taught us for real in Sunday School about rededicating the Temple, then they’d also have had to teach us about the importance of the Temple in Judaism. And there is no Judaism without the Temple (but I’ll get to that soon).

All of the above is why I stopped with the Hanukah bullshit many years ago. Yes, I still accept gifts on Hanukah, and occasionally give them too, but my sardonic “line” has for more than half a decade been that Hanukah celebrates the birthday of Moses and that it is therefore the holiest day of the Jewish year, because Moses is our Messiah. I was never jealous of Xmas – it annually turns millions of ordinarily good people into raving lunatics – I was just trying to be funny effortlessly and deflect the hassle of having to care.

Since making Aliyah, I’ve come to see it differently. It’s well known that when a Jew chooses to live outside the land of Israel, no matter how religious he pretends to be, it’s as if he has no god. But there are a lot of valuable ideas in Judaism with portability that can be applied to life outside the land of Israel. Hanukah is not one of those things. Jews who attempt to celebrate Hanukah outside of Israel are therefore not only making themselves out to be idolaters, but they’re mocking the rest of us who do live here and who do cherish what Hanukah is really all about.

Hanukah is a period to celebrate the beginning of a great dynastic family that ruled this country for over a century, the Hashmonaim. It’s kind of like if the Romanovs or the Tudors had decided to create holidays that celebrated the imposition of their rule, except the Hashmonaim were also priests – high priests after defeating the Seleucid enemies – and so performed the Temple services for the Jewish nation in a time when we didn’t need rabbis to tell us what to believe and how to believe it.

The Hashmonaim dynasty, according to extant texts, started gloriously and ended shamefully. It’s not difficult to list their faults: they practiced forced conversions (viz, the Idumeans); they usurped the title King, which rightfully only belongs to the House of David; they quickly Hellenized and became disconnected from much of the common people; most awfully, they exhausted so much time and effort in succession struggles that they sowed the demise of their own regime and of the practicability of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (it was a direct result of one such internal conflict that ascendant Rome, a regional power and traditional ally of Hashmonaim-led Judea against the Seleucid Empire, was invited to become a power broker in this country). Despite it all, I choose to celebrate the Hashmonaim during the week of Hanukah (and during the rest of the year) because, taken all together, I believe that their successes outweigh their failures.

In the time of the Hashmonaim, when the Temple functioned daily and kohanim performed sacrifices on behalf of all of us, the Jewish nation had a physical and spiritual center. As disgusting and as rotten to the core as the later Hashmonaim “kings” were, they knew what the mitzvot were and what the concept of mitzvot is all about (hint to Americans of the Mosaic extraction: mitzvah does not mean “good deed”). And although they didn’t follow some of the big ones (eg, don’t murder), they at least didn’t try to add any to the count.

So, people. Hanukah is not about giving and receiving gifts (duh). It’s also not about dreidels. It’s also not about candles or oil. It’s a holiday of rededicating the Temple to serve as a Jewish center and, in the absence of a Temple, it’s a holiday of rededicating ourselves to the cause of restoring Jewish sovereignty to the Temple Mount. Let us all, every single one of us, ask ourselves and each other, on this Hanukah and every Kislev until that goal is attained, what we have done to attain it.

Have a meaningful Hanukah! is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Much of college hasn’t changed from however long ago. The administration, the faculty and the students, for example, are still all full of shit. My classmates are an interesting group, and I mean that in a good way and in a not-entirely-good way. Some of them seem to love learning and some seem to be passionate about the subjects. It is a very mixed group, with a lot of people from Europe, southern Africa and North America, as well as Israelis. Almost everyone is younger than I am – the students from America tend to be 18-19, the students from Europe maybe 19-20, and the students from Israel about 20-22. They probably did not get a good high school education like mine, which makes me feel bad for them because, depending on the seriousness of this program we’re all in, doing a BA in three years could require a lot of work. I’m quite a bit unimpressed that many would have pursued a bachelor’s degree in Business, but were turned away by that program’s math requirement, and ended up in the Government program because it’s considered easier. On the other hand, I think the general consensus is that the student body at IDC is the most physically attractive group of people in Israel, which to me means eye candy, or another reason to attend classes in which attendance is not required (note: I enjoy the subject material of all my classes except for one, so I would attend class anyway).

On the other hand, some aspects of college in 2006 are totally different from what I experienced in 1999-2002. Remember hearing 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago about something called “the paperless office”? Today, IDC is doing everything possible to achieve “the paperless campus.” Every course in which I’m enrolled has a website that’s accessible by signing into the university’s website. On the course websites, I’m expected to locate the following:

• my course syllabi. They are not printed out and distributed on hard copy in class, which means that when a professor jumps immediately into a confusing (for my classmates, not for me) lecture on the very first day, no one even knows where we are.
• weekly readings for class. What ever happened to buying the book in the bookstore (or online to save money) and picking up a copy of the coursepack in the printshop? IDC’s bookstore contains school supplies and about five different books; there is no printshop. This means it is suddenly my own responsibility to print all the readings – if, that is, the professors actually want me to read them.
• a PowerPoint presentation for each lecture. Back in the day, we would read what we were supposed to read (or not read it), then come to class and listen to a professor lecturing and occasionally writing notes on the board. We’d write down what we considered important, and anything that was covered both in the reading and the lecture would definitely be in the test. Now, the professors post their atrocious visual lectures online before class. We’re supposed to download them and open them in our laptops during class, and type notes into the individual PowerPoint pages as the pages are displayed on the projector. What is wrong about this system? Only everything. I won’t go here into why PowerPoint is totally evil, but I will point out that an entire generation of college students is being trained not to take notes – not to know by ear what’s important, not to know how to write it down – and not to study for tests. And at the same time, professors seem perhaps to be losing their lecturing skills – one of the things that PowerPoint does to people is atrophy their ability to improvise.
• announcements for class. Did the classroom get changed arbitrarily by the administration? Is class canceled next week? You won’t know unless you log into the site.
• assignments.
• and more! Want to contact the professor at his or her email? The address is on the site, since there wasn’t a syllabus… too bad the address on the site might not work!

This probably would not be so bad, except: IDC’s network and website absolutely, positively suck. Starting with the network – it is accessible only in certain buildings and, in those buildings, only in certain classrooms. In some cases, my computer can see the network to join it, but the network is not connected to the internet. In other cases, the network is invisible (ie, out of range) or only momentarily visible. Only in a minority of classes can I actually get onto the internet to access the course website, where I would find everything for the class. If the problem with IDC’s network is that I can rarely get onto it, the problem with IDC’s website is that I never want to get onto it: without a doubt the most poorly designed website that I’m unfortunate enough to need to access regularly, its programmers violated virtually every rule of decent, sane site design in its construction. It’s super graphic-intensive, which means it takes a long time to load every page. Everything is in frames, and opening in new windows when I don’t want it to. It doesn’t work on most web browsers. All the actual information is stored on the site not as text, but as numbered .doc files that need to be downloaded, opened and immediately retitled because nobody thought to give them proper titles in the first place – or how about saving bandwidth, server space and years of man-hours by just writing the information where I want to find it? Oh, what else? I’ll tell you what else: on the first day of school, I signed into my brand new IDC email account and immediately discovered that it was overrun by spam! Since then, I’ve been getting near-daily spam reports from the piece of crap spam filtration system that the university installed. And the reports are, of course, html emails that are practically unusable. Idiots!

By the way, this is also the method the RRIS administration chooses for communicating directly with students. When they need to tell me something, they send me an email. But instead of writing the one line of relevant text in the email, they write it in a MS Word file and attach the file to the email, and the content of the email is just to let me know that there’s a file attached. Unbelievable!

For first year students in my program, seven classes are required: Introduction to Government, Introduction to Modern History and the Growth of Zionism, Introduction to International Politics, History of the Modern Middle East, Globalization and International Political Economy, Microeconomics, Communication Skills in English. I was exempted automatically from English on the grounds that I studied for at least one year in a university where English was the language of instruction, which is a bit of a relief because my understanding is that I might have exploded if I’d been compelled to attend even one of the lessons.

Regarding the other classes, I have run into a bit of difficulty. Obviously every single one of the remaining six classes, with the lone but obvious exception of Microeconomics, is fascinating, entertaining and enjoyable to me. And yet, can I really be expected to sit through courses that are in three cases (Microeconomics, Modern History / Growth of Zionism, Modern Mideast) exact replicas of courses I’ve studied elsewhere, and and in another case (Government) a very close approximation of several classes combined? I think not – to do so would be unfair to me, unfair to my classmates and unfair to my professors – and therefore I need to get myself exempted from them. The school, however, has implemented a ludicrous policy of requiring both transcripts and syllabi from the earlier classes in order to apply for exemptions.

What does this mean, practically? If I’d taken the earlier classes in Israel, the syllabi would be on file at the university. In America, however, universities and colleges do not keep syllabi and make them available. So I have to go through box after box of papers in a country that I don’t live in, in order to find the documentation for classes that I took years ago. Thanks, RRIS; in the mean time I am attending all the classes from which I’ll eventually be exempted.

Here are some more of my least favorite things about IDC:

1. Suppose a professor assigns a paper in class. This is normal and natural. What is neither normal nor natural is that we the students don’t turn in the assignment to the professor. We turn it in to someone in an office at the other end of the campus. This is the Heder Avodot, or Assignments Room. That person then submits our work to the professor, who gives it to his TA, who grades it and then reverses the process for us to get it back. Sounds really smart!
2. Some of my professors actually take attendance during class by passing around a sign-in sheet. IDC has a policy of excused absences and unexcused absences. Wow! So what happens when my mother and brother come to visit and I want to go meet them at the airport? That’s an unexcused absence! And what happens when I have medical tests that last an entire day? That is an excused absence, but of course the professors don’t handle the bureaucracy of excused absences themselves – students are responsible to take notes from the doctor to another university office and give them to another university bureaucrat.
3. I live in central Tel Aviv, work in Ramat Gan and go to school in Herzliya, which means I need to spend a great deal of time and money waiting for, and traveling on, trains and buses. The bus from Tel Aviv to Herzliya takes a ridiculously long amount of time and I’d still need to walk 15 minutes from my house to it, and another 15 minutes from the stop to the university, so it’s out of the question, and I’m consequently taking the train every day. But the train station in Herzliya is about two miles from the university with no bus service and the only way to get to the university from the train is to take a private cab, which costs NIS 20, several times the price of the train itself! Fortunately, I’m usually able to find someone else and split the cabfare, but this situation is absolutely moronic and it must be ended. I can’t figure out why the University hasn’t gotten the idea to run a shuttle back and forth from campus, charging NIS 10/person. They could make a huge profit off of us commuters. On a positive note, tremping (ie, hitchhiking) out of the university back to the train station, or to work in Ramat Gan, or to home in Tel Aviv, is very easy.
4. What else? I don’t have a student ID card and no one seems to be able to tell me when I’ll get one. Apparently, they send students’ photos in batches of 50 to a place in Tel Aviv to have the cards made, and therefore it can take three weeks, a month or maybe even longer. So why doesn’t the university just buy an ID card making machine? NYU had one and it resulted in me getting my ID card within three minutes.
5. There’s more to complain about; I just can’t think of it all right now.

college (part deux) is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

When I want to make an international phone call, I have to dial a series of digits before it that tell Orange, my cellular provider, whom I’m going to be paying for the call. That’s because the mobile phone companies in Israel don’t actually provide international phone service – or rather, they don’t charge money for it – international phone service is provided by the internet companies. But don’t be confused into believing that the internet companies actually provide internet service. That’s done by the phone company or the satellite television company (I think). The internet companies are only ISPs, which is to say that they only give out usernames and passwords to connect to the internet service provided by, in my case, Bezek.

Here’s what I just learned:

Anyway, I needed to reconnect my international phone service because it was disconnected last month (I’ll explain below). I called, began speaking to a nice-sounding girl in Hebrew before she infuriated me by saying something I know to be false, then she transferred me to another guy who tried calming me down, a big mistake because I know that calm people get nothing in Israel, least of all what they’re entitled to. He had to transfer me to the billing department, and it was someone there who informed me that when I make an international call and dial 017 in front of the numbers, Netvision, the internet company, sends a bill to Orange, the mobile phone company, and then Orange pays Netvision for my call, and then I pay Orange back on the next statement. And that is the absolute dumbest system in the world.

Why my international service was disconnected:

I bought a phone from Orange in February 2005, but decided against paying the monthly insurance fee. Why? I’ve been using cell phones now for almost six and a half years, never lost one or had one stolen, and never ruined one by being thrown into a lake or something equally terrifying. The phone was covered for repairs for the first year, and of course in the 13th month that I had it, it slowly stopped working properly. I dealt with the situation for a while until I couldn’t handle it anymore, then went to Orange and told them I needed them to fix it. They were, of course, snide – didn’t I know that they recommended purchasing the insurance (note: paying monthly for insurance on a phone, over the lifespan of the phone, is roughly equivalent to buying two phones instead of one)? The deal in their technical center is that they will charge anywhere between NIS 99 and NIS 300 to inspect the phone and to fix it, but they won’t tell you how much it will cost until it’s already been done, and you have to agree to pay up to NIS 300 before they will even look at the phone. I was very close to telling the guy and his whole company to go fuck himself, but I decided against it, and agreed to that outrageous deal.

Surprise, surprise, they had to recondition my phone and it cost me NIS 300, which they expected me to pay on the spot. But they guaranteed that it would take no more than 40 minutes, and due to the stupid mistakes of Orange employees, it took them three tries and well over two hours to get the phone working. I told them to put the charge on my next phone bill in the expectation that I’d be able to complain to someone in their corporate office about the terrible treatment I received at the repair center and have some of that NIS 300 knocked off. Instead, the charge on my next bill from Orange was over NIS 1000 for a brand new phone!!!!!!! Naturally I refused to pay it, though I preferred for someone from Orange to call me rather than me wasting my energy and time to fight through their crap menu and call them, and eventually they disconnected my phone line, preventing me from making any outgoing calls.

So I did call them, and I talked to a very helpful employee who admitted that there was a mistake and corrected the charge. Unfortunately, at that point I didn’t have enough in my bank account to pay the accumulated two months’ phone bills plus the repair charge. So I arranged with her to pay one month’s bill, have my phone opened, and then to pay the other bill plus the repair charge shortly after my pay day, which at the time was three weeks in the future.

Pay day came, and the money should have been deducted automatically from my credit card, and lo and behold, a day later my phone was cut off. So I called Orange screaming – how dare they how dare they! – and I talked to a person who told me that the charge had been declined by my bank!!!

Now, faithful readers know how I have gotten terrific service from one banker at Bank Leumi, snif 914 Emek Refaim, named Yael. So they will be shocked to learn that I called Bank Leumi the next morning, asked for Yael to call me, was told that she would call me before 2:15 that afternoon, and then didn’t hear from her! I called the bank again at 2:30 and yelled at them and they told me that there was a record of my request to speak with Yael but they needed to open an internal investigation into why she didn’t return my call (this is probably mandated by law for the banks), and of course the bank was closed until the following morning because what kind of a sucker works after 2:30 anyway?

One of my astute coworkers, overhearing my highly agitated screaming into the phone, advised me that as a veteran Olah herself, she knows that there are two types of frames, or limits, placed on Israeli bank accounts. The first is a limit of how far you can go into minus, or overdraft. This is a very important limit and it has everything to do with your monthly salary, expenses and – most importantly – your personal relationship with your banker – and this is why I insisted on speaking with Yael. But I was not even close to going over my overdraft limit, which is why I was so infuriated that Bank Leumi was denying the credit card charge from Orange. The second limit, my coworker told me, is simply a limit on how much you can charge on your card each month. It has nothing to do with how much you have in the bank or what your overdraft limit is (note: Israeli credit cards are basically debit cards linked to a person’s bank account, including overdraft)! So I called Orange and told them to take the bulk of the money from my credit card and the rest directly from my bank account, which they did successfully, and my phone service was restored.

Incidentally, Yael called the following morning, sounding very nervous, asking why I claimed that she had not returned my call, since doesn’t she always return my calls and didn’t she return the most recent call (I’d needed to speak with her the previous week on a different matter altogether)? I asked her if she had gotten the message that I’d called the previous day, and she said that she hadn’t, and that was the end, presumably, of the internal investigation. Also, I asked her about my credit card spending limit. It was NIS 500! I could easily spend more than that on groceries alone in a month, and I was outraged that I was getting a “declined” message simply because of that insanity. I told her that I wanted her to raise the spending limit on my credit card to reflect my current earning and spending habits. She suggested raising it to NIS 2000. I countered with NIS 4000. We settled on NIS 3500. Of course, this does not mean that I can spend beyond my overdraft limit. In order to spend more than my limit, I need to get personal and direct approval from Yael.

That all happened about, I don’t know, three weeks ago. About two weeks ago I wanted to call America to congratulate my friend from high school who secretly got married a year ago and didn’t tell anybody until her mother sent out notices last month, but I couldn’t make the call and I got redirected to Orange. A guy at Orange told me that I needed to have international service turned on. Duh, I replied, but he said that he couldn’t turn it on because I was set up to pay Orange by bank transfer instead of by credit card! So I got really angry at him – didn’t he know the bank payment was a one-time thing? And then I freaking blew up at him when he told me that the billing department was closed and wouldn’t open for another two and a half days, because it was a Thursday evening and they evidently don’t work on Fridays or Saturday nights.

So anyway, that’s why I was calling Orange today – I had to get them to confirm that I’m paying by credit card so that they can reopen my international service, for which I pretend to pay Netvision, but actually Netvision sends a bill to Orange, Orange pays Netvision, and I pay Orange.

What a country!!!

who knew? is a post from Lines Writing Lines.