On Friday for lunch I found myself in a Chinese restaurant. There they prepare your meal right in front of you. You choose your vegetables right upfront after paying for the meal. You get a big bowl to fill in the veggies of your choosing. Then you place your bowl on top of the next table for the server to grab it and toss-and-turn it on this gigantic hot pan.

While paying for the meal you also can choose what kind of dead animal you want to mix with the vegies – and oh, don’t forget to tell them your name. You have plenty of options including cow, sheep, shrimp, fish and chicken. After about five to ten minutes of tossing and turning on the hot plate, the meal is ready for consumption.

The same lady that picked up the bowl full of veggies that you chose will call your name when the bowl is ready. Of course now it is hot and nicely cooked Chinese food made right in front of you with your own chousing. That should be gratifying for most folks. In fast food restaurants you get options of pre-prepared meals -here you prepare your own options.

In most Asian restaurants -either it be a all-you-can-eat buffet or fast food type, you can expect to find chopsticks as an alternative to fork and knife. Just another pleasant option you might not find in other restaurants. Some chopsticks come in plastic bags and some come in paper bags. The chopsticks are stuck to each other when you take them out of the bag and have to separate the two.

In this particular restaurant they used the paper wrapper. I had not seen such a wrapper around chopsticks before. The wrappers are usually plain white paper, but not this one. As you can see it was nicely designed, colored and some writings on both side of the wrapper for further attraction (perhaps). There are writings in both English and Chinese. I can hardly pronouns any Chinese words, never mind the writings, but the English writings on the wrapper did get and attention and I start reading them.

To my surprise, it offered a bit piece of the chopstick history. Now I know that chopsticks were invented in China back in 16 century BC (if that makes sense) and according to the great Confucius (circa 551-478 BC) knives are “equated with acts of aggression…”. I didn’t know this about chopsticks or Confucius.

I took some Religion classes back in college and wrote about Confucianism, his ideas on politics and life and his writings that to this day affect and influence so many around the world. Now that I am writing this article about the nice Chinese food I had for lunch and learned some history as well, I had to go back and do some re-research on the Man -then as I was reading I came upong this: He thought his students and deciples that they should “…think deeply for themselves and relentlessly study the outside world…”, which we clearly are lacking at this moment in time.

Next time you are at a restaurant maybe you will learn some history. I know I did today and had a great meal for lunch too.

I have been with your company for couple of months now. Last month I got a bill for about $840 and called the customer service to resolve the issue. After talking with her for about forty minutes, she said she had forwarded the issue to her manager and they will take care of it. After few days the issue still remained and I called again – the same response was given to me and I was asked to pay the monthly service fee, which was about $60.

Here I am after two weeks, my phone service has been suspended, I have tried to call the customer service line multiple times. I have called 866-cingular and 800-331-0500 numbers, after I enter my phone number, the automated system takes me back to the same spot and repeats the same prompt – please enter your 10 digit wireless phone number. I don’t seem to get anywhere further than that.

And to add to all of this frustration – I cannot logon to my account online to see what is happening to my account – this is an entirely different issue which I had called about before the billing issue arrived.

This is the only address I could find on the internet to contact you. I cannot email because I have to be logged in. I cannot log in to my account because it was never fixed in the first place. I cannot call the customer service because I get the run-around by the automated system. Now my phone is suspended and I cannot make any phone calls.

I hope this letter reaches someone who can help resolve this issue. I have tried multiple times to contact you through all the means you provide – 800 number, my cell phone, the internet and I have not been successful in any of them. Someone needs to resolve this issue which has been going on for two weeks now.

Ok, so I am still waiting for this company to fix my bill. It only has been two weeks since I called them, twice. Both times I was given a date for the problem to be fixed. But what do I know about how these companies are run.

Not only is my bill not fixed, now I can’t even log on the Internet to check my account. I have no idea where my account stands. There is another way I can find out how much is my balance -send a text message and get a response with total balance due – not that I didn’t utilize this service – the problem still exists – so what a consumer to do?

This morning I call their 800 number. After entering my 10 digit phone number starting with area code – I was redirected to customer service number where I reentered the numbers – It waited for a while and asked me again for 10 digit phone number. It seemed like I was going in circles, even with the 800 customer service number. I hung up and called again – this time it just got worse. After entering my cell number as prompted – the line disconnected after ten second hold. I called again and same thing happened. I tried to contact them through email. That was a dead end because I have to be logged on my account to do that.

Here I am wondering if I am being targeted by my cell phone company as a test case or some prank they are playing on me. I cannot log on the Internet, I cannot get a person on the phone, my bill is out of whack -after two weeks- and the problem still exist. I think I will just wait till they call me. I have tried my part, as a customer. The company should do theirs.

I have a $2000 wireless bill. This is beyond crazy and I don’t want to use the word ‘incompetence’, at least not yet. It is suppose to be corrected/fixed by Friday -which of course was extended from a Monday. My wireless company, Cingular has gone nuts and there seems to be no one that can fix the problem. I have talked with few “technical” assistant persons now and the problem still persists.

Click here to see for yourself – a $1971.61 bill! Last Thursday I got a letter with a warning that I should pay $821.23 dollar or my cell phone will be suspended. I called them to find out what the hell had happened and where did I call that cost that much. I don’t remember calling the Internationals Space Station for a crew check-up.

I was told that perhaps there was a mistake -of course after being on the phone for an hour, I was assured that the problem has been moved to proper personnel who has the authority to fix/adjust the bill. The “customer service” lady who I talked with had the authority to adjust up to $175 and anything above that –the manager had to take over and authorize.

This was a Labor day weekend so there was plenty of time for the said company to fix this. When I would log in to check my account on Tuesday, the whole bill problem should have been resolve -at least that is what the lady told me after an hour of conversation back-and-forth.

This is Wednesday and my bill has jumped from $821 to $1900. Apparently I made another call to the ISS over the weekend to tell the crew happy Labor Day suckers up-there. I will just wait till this Friday to see if Cingular can adjust/fix my bill or I will find out if I made another long distance up-there phone call.

Since the inception of history as we understand it, there have been writings. From Egyptian who wrote on the wall to now-a-day bloggers who flock to virtual world to fill it with information.

There is nothing new about writing. We have been writing to record history and to pass on the knowledge to each other and coming generations to be. Though the art of writing has not changed, the science has. A few centuries ago men wrote using stones, wood, walls, leaves, earth and so on to keep record of their time and history. Then they would keep them in caves and/or mountains for safekeeping and most of the time forget about them. The future generations and scientist would discover their knowledge centuries later and learn about their way of life.

We all know much about the creation of pen and paper and their history. I will not elaborate on that. But we can fast forward to now and see what we utilize to pass and record our knowledge and history. Of course the pen and the paper will always be with us regardless of how much we advance in technology and science of writing. But since computers have become so widespread like TV sets of the 70s and 80s each household posses one.

The computer phenomenon combined with the age of the internet has given our generation a particular spot in history like nothing before us. All of the human kind, from deserts of Africa and mountains of Afghanistan to our own living room, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can write, publish and spread their knowledge, stories and pass it on to the rest of the world in an instant.

I am writing this story and you and the rest of the world can read it in about 5 minutes; once posted. I can read and learn about thousands of other thoughts, opinions, stories et al in instant they are published on the internet where knowledge and the spread of it is NOW. There are no caves or mountains to keep the knowledge save so the next generation can find it in hundred years. All the knowledge will be in virtual world; archived and added-on on hourly bases for the next hundred of years to come.