WSJ: They Just Wanted Their Couches. An Accidental Reply-All Email Storm Followed. // A furniture retailer alerted customers about a delivery delay, mistakenly copying in all their email addresses. The conversation broadened. ‘That’s when things got really interesting.’

courtesy WSJ Online 3/26/21

Jeff DeMars placed an order for a Cobble Hill Hannah sofa in Dragonfly (translation: green) from ABC Carpet & Home in November. Earlier this week, the 32-year-old program coordinator from Brooklyn received an email from the furniture retailer, signed by its CEO, alerting him that his sofa would be delayed until May.

He looked at the “CC” field and saw 204 other email addresses. His fellow customers weren’t invisibly BCC’d, but there on display.

So began the great couch conversation of 2021, with hundreds of strangers suddenly linked by their lack of a new sofa.

“It was pretty immediate that I was like, oh this is clearly a mistake,” says Mr. DeMars. “I didn’t have any plans for the evening so I figured, oh I might as well follow this and see where it goes.”

There were some inquiries about being refunded for shipping, says Mr. DeMars, but “no one really said ‘please remove me’ right away.”

Then out of nowhere, he says, someone named Zoe mentioned she was single and looking for a Jewish man: “That’s when things got really interesting,” Mr. DeMars says.

The accidental CC, a staple of office email culture for decades, typically sets off a cascade of intentional and unintentional reply-alls that drive its recipients mad: Otherwise smart people start asking, “Why am I getting these emails?” —which makes others on the thread demand to be taken off this list. That begets additional reply-alls telling everyone else to STOP REPLYING ALL. A comedian in the group usually seizes the opportunity like open-mic night.

The phenomenon is a frustrating spectacle of technological absurdity. But 13 months into the pandemic, this particular chain ended up bonding strangers and breaking the monotony of the 54th consecutive Tuesday night when no one had anything better to do.

Carolyn Ramo, 41, says that as the director of a nonprofit, she’s fastidious about communication and has a very busy inbox, so she was initially irritated by the arrival of the emails. The should-be owner of the Cobble Hill Boutique sofa in Brussels Midnight (also known as navy) made that known in her own reply to the chain. That didn’t stop others from adding their own replies, more than 150 in total, group members estimate.

“I wrote, ‘Yes it’s really insane to not BCC,'” Ms. Ramo says. “This is in all caps, exclamation point times six. Then I wrote, ‘A real amateur-hour move.’ Then I wrote, ‘You should give us all free shipping.'”

But once she was done with work that day, Ms. Ramo saw a reply from a woman who suggested everyone be more understanding given the pandemic. Hadn’t they ever had a bad day? That, along with an offer from a woman who said the group was welcome to hit her up if they needed any tile, made Ms. Ramo see the emails as less of a nuisance.

The tone shifted, Ms. Ramo says, away from couches and delivery times to other matters.

People started offering to set up Zoe on dates. One member of the email chain wondered if the group could manage to get Zoe engaged before their couches arrived. A few group members began taking screenshots of the emails to document the freewheeling exchange, which The Wall Street Journal reviewed.

Eventually chatter turned to all getting together one day, perhaps at one of their homes or at Zoe’s wedding.

Another respondent requested additional details to help the search for a groom: Was Zoe looking for someone Reform, Orthodox or Reconstructionist? An ABC customer on the thread from Seattle said a brother-in-law in Brooklyn was game for being set up.

Someone else chimed in to say she went from “extremely pissed off” to “feeling a degree of human connectedness with strangers” she hadn’t felt in a year.

Ms. Ramo devoured the replies. “We heard more about people’s pets,” she said. Someone’s cat, Spanky, had recently passed away and said the new couch was meant to help with the grief. Spanky had destroyed two couches and a love seat from the same store.

Ms. Ramo suspects that because many of the customers are New Yorkers, herself included, they’re hungry for the kinds of happenstance interactions with strangers that, pre-pandemic, occurred when people were out and about. She says that she plans to set Zoe up with her tennis coach. (Her tennis coach doesn’t know this yet.)

A subset of replies to the thread focused on the ABC fabric swatches some customers received before ordering their sofas: It turns out they double nicely as coasters. Multiple people emailed photos of drinks on their respective swatch-coasters. One noted that the group now knew how the upholstery held up to “repeated exposure to moisture” but wondered if velvet was the best choice.

Katie Bartasevich, 42, says that because she ordered her Cobble Hill Brownstone sectional in Theater Stream (gray) after seeing it in person, she didn’t take a fabric swatch home. When she saw pictures of the coasters, she felt left out. “Apparently I missed out on the coaster trend,” she posted to Instagram. She shared this and other observations over 2½ hours on Tuesday night, relaying the doings of the ABC chain to her followers.

“People are now starting to sign their emails with what couch they ordered,” she wrote. Someone named Karen sought design advice from the email group, asking whether the Geo armchair in Creta 92 (neon yellowish) would go nicely with the couch she had ordered in Vance Rose (pink) velvet.

“These emails came in and one was better than the next,” says Ms. Bartasevich, who works in advertising and lives in Manhattan.

After posting 30 or so email screenshots to an Instagram story until 11 that night, Ms. Bartasevich says she had to stop. Before doing so, she was contacted by her friend’s fiancé, who works for the dating app Hinge. The Hinge employee offered complimentary premium memberships to anyone on the email thread who was single. Ms. Bartasevich notified the group and heard back from six women taking her up on the offer.

Gus Goldsack, 34, a product manager from Brooklyn, initially replied to the thread with a quick joke about how he would look forward to meeting everyone at Zoe’s wedding. But as he got sucked into the thread, he kept seeing people comparing timelines for how long they had been waiting for their sofas and could see there was some genuine frustration.

About 80 emails in, he started to feel a pang of guilt. He replied all. “The weight of feeling like a fraud in this group is too much to bear,” he wrote. He had to “come clean.”

“I got the sofa in February,” Mr. Goldsack says. “It’s beautiful. I love it.”

He confessed to the email chain. Along with his confession, Mr. Goldsack included a photo of his Cobble Hill Brownstone sofa in Theater Stream (with matching ottoman) and his cats, Fred and Didi, curled up on it. He told the group it was worth the wait. Someone replied that the group’s future get-together would have to be at Mr. Goldsack’s apartment, because he was the only one with a place to sit.

ABC Carpet & Home sent the entire group an apology note the day after the initial email.

“Mistakes are a part of being human—it’s what you do with them that matters,” said the note. ABC thanked customers for turning the mistake around for the greater good. In a post-script, the company added it was sorry to hear about Spanky the cat and that it was rooting for Zoe.

An ABC spokeswoman said the CC on the original email was “human error.”

Like many retailers and manufacturers, ABC has experienced delays. The ABC spokeswoman said the hold up was due in part to factories shutting down during the pandemic, then reopening at reduced capacities. Surges in demand for home products also contributed, she said, in addition to supply issues with raw materials.

Several of the ABC customers from the reply-all chain say the best part of being on the thread is that one of its members started a GoFundMe page to buy furniture for a family that has suffered during the pandemic. The coordination of that effort has been moved from email to Slack.

Zoe Weiner, 29, says she has two upcoming dates thanks to the ABC chain. “I am far more normal than soliciting setups from 200 complete strangers might imply,” she adds. “Pandemic times are tough for a single lady in this city.”

reprinted courtesy Wall Street Journal Online ©2021 Dow Jones & Co. By Katherine Bindley   26 March 2021     

Peter Gelsey
Wailea Makena Real Estate, Inc.
Maui, HI
www.petergelsey.com
direct (808) 344-8000
email peter@petergelsey.com
RB-19156 RB-19157

Economist 6/12/21 – Guns and Race / Double Standard
book review “The Second” by Carol Anderson
— Other countries have often wondered about the U.S. 2nd Amendment “The Right to Bear Arms”. An incisive article in the british Economist magazine sheds new light on the dichotomy —

Double standard, The entwined histories of guns and race in America — For black Americans, says Carol Anderson, the right to bear arms has been an empty promise
Books & arts
Jun 12th 2021 edition
The Second. By Carol Anderson. Bloomsbury; 272 pages; £18.99

A black man with a gun has been white America’s nightmare since before the republic was founded. Slave uprisings, black soldiers fighting in the country’s wars, even African-American motorists—all have spurred fear and violence backed by white-supremacist authority. In “The Second”, a compact yet sweeping history of guns and race in America, Carol Anderson argues that the right “to keep and bear arms” has never been about an abstract liberty to carry guns. Its primary role has been “black exclusion and debasement”.

The Second Amendment, Ms Anderson writes, was born in sin. The word “slavery” never appears in the constitution. Racism is not explicitly inscribed in the Second Amendment. But, she claims, it was at the heart of the guarantee. When the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention (of whom 25 were slave-owners) drafted a replacement for the Articles of Confederation in 1787, they knew they needed the assent of southern states. The amendment, Ms Anderson says, was a “bribe to the South using the control of black people as the payoff”. Slave-owners, terrified that their suffering property would rise up, could be sure of arming themselves.

Other scholars offer more nuanced accounts of the amendment’s origins, but there is little question that its “well-regulated militia” carried a glint of racial dominance. It was buttressed by the Uniform Militia Act of 1792, which required white males aged 18 to 45 to join state militias and buy guns ….
In 1846 Georgia’s Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment protected the “right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys…to keep and bear arms of every description”. But it declined to strike down a law barring “any free persons of colour” from owning them. Several other states had similar prohibitions.

The emptiness, for black Americans, of the right to bear arms is amply documented in Ms Anderson’s vivid retelling. No landmarks of racial progress—neither Reconstruction in the 19th century, nor the civil-rights movement of the 20th—made a difference. Nor has the National Rifle Association (nra), the zealous defender of gun rights that came to the fore in the 1960s, targeted this prejudice. In 1967 the nra helped draft a bill in California to disarm the Black Panthers, a black self-defence organisation that “had broken no firearms laws” ….

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition of Economist magazine under the headline “Double standard”.

Kihei’s Ka Ono Ulu Estates, a covenanted master planned community in central Kihei, yesterday recorded its first sale ever in the 7 figure range, as 555 Halalai St closed at a record $1.005 million — $17000 over the asking price. Peter Gelsey, a local realtor active in the Ka Ono Ulu community, commented on the sale: “By and large the vast majority of Ka Ono Ulu Estates (KOU) homes are owner-occupied and demonstrate pride of ownership. One of our community’s strong points is the comprehensive sidewalk network that goes for several miles within the KOU district and the excellent lighting that the county’s streetlights provide all night throughout the community. A bit of cultural color – we are home to Kihei’s only synogogue and on their sabbath (Saturdays) you can see the congregants walking through the KOU streets to the synagogue on Alulike St in traditional costume, since their culture prohibits use of machinery like cars on the sabbath. All in all a very friendly and welcoming community.” Contact Peter Gelsey at 808-344-8000 or email peter@petergelsey.com for more information on homes available in this family-friendly walkable Kihei community.

Coronavirus pandemic pushes expansion of ‘hospital at home’ treatment

More patients are opting to be treated where they feel safest: at home.

reprinted courtesy AP Associated Press 8/21/20

Hospital at Home programs taking off amid corona crisis

At-home care aims to reduce strains on medical centers and ease patients’ fears

As hospitals care for people with  Covid-19 and try to keep others from catching the virus, more patients are opting to be treated where they feel safest: at home.

Across the U.S., “hospital at home” programs are taking off amid the pandemic, thanks to communications technology, portable medical equipment and teams of doctors, nurses, X-ray techs and paramedics. That’s reducing strains on medical centers and easing patients’ fears.

The programs represent a small slice of the roughly 35 million U.S. hospitalizations each year, but they are growing fast with boosts from Medicare and private health insurers. Like telemedicine, the concept stands to become more popular with consumers hooked on home delivery and other Internet-connected conveniences.

Eligible patients typically are acutely ill with — but don’t need round-the-clock intensive care for — common conditions including chronic heart failure, respiratory ailments, diabetes complications, infections and even COVID-19.

They are linked to 24/7 command centers via video and monitoring devices that send their vital signs. They get several daily home visits from a dedicated medical team. Just like in a hospital, they can press an emergency button any time for instant help.

Research on such programs around the world over the past 25 years shows patients recover faster, have fewer complications and are more satisfied, while costs can be a third lower.

Doctors, hospital officials and patients tout other advantages: People get more rest sleeping in their own bed. They can eat what they want, start moving around quicker and go outside for fresh air. They’re less likely to fall in their familiar surroundings, where they have support from family and even pets.

“I would recommend it in a heartbeat for anybody to be able to stay at home,” said William Merry, who received care for pneumonia in July at his Ipswich, Massachusetts, home. “There was never any problem. Never.”

Merry, who had endured an uncomfortable hospital stay six years ago, refused another one when antibiotic pills didn’t help and his temperature hit 103. So his doctor arranged care through Boston-based Medically Home.

Merry and wife Linda, a retired nurse, said they were amazed at how quickly the service transformed their dining room into a mini-hospital room. Technicians set up medical equipment, gave them supplies and oxygen tanks, then explained how everything worked.

That eased their stress, as did regular video calls with a doctor. They got daily schedules listing planned medical staff visits, blood draws, tests, IV medicine administration and other care, she said.

“I think it’s really important,” she cautioned, “that the person has somebody that’s able to be at home.”

Dr. Bruce Leff, a geriatrics professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a home hospital pioneer, did pilot studies years ago. He found benefits for elderly patients who, as he said, were otherwise “basically going to get crushed by the hospital” due to risks of developing blood clots and infections, losing mobility and developing delirium.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic emerged earlier this year, some hospitals were considering at-home-care programs to absorb temporary patient spikes — and avoid the high cost of new buildings.

It’s unknown exactly how many U.S. programs exist, but when COVID-19 struck, some institutions rushed to sign up with Medically Home and similar services.

Nashville, Tennessee-based Contessa Health, which serves 14 hospitals in six states, says it’s adding two more hospitals shortly and is negotiating potential contracts for about 20 more. Patient volume has jumped 140% since last year and it’s added care for patients “admitted” from urgent care and cancer clinics.

Another company, DispatchHealth, previously focused mainly on preventing ER visits by rushing paramedics to provide diagnostic testing, medication and other care at patients’ homes or elsewhere. The Denver-based company says it has 200-plus contracts with insurers in 19 U.S. markets to treat seriously ill and injured people at home. It piloted a hospital-at-home program in November, already has programs running in three cities and plans rapid expansion.

Some hospitals have mounted their own at-home programs. In late March, eight of the Atrium Health system’s 36 hospitals in the Carolinas and Georgia began one for COVID-19 patients who don’t need intensive care. It’s already treated about 11,000 people.

Meanwhile, hospitals with existing programs are seeing far more patients choose at-home care.

In New York, the Mount Sinai at Home program went from handling 10 patients a month to up to 30, said its director, Dr. Linda DeCherrie. The program has since added a twist in which patients start care inside the hospital, then finish at home.

“Everybody we offered it to said yes,” said DeCherrie.

DeCherrie said the hospital-at-home model has been used on a small scale in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, but it was held back because traditional Medicare and some insurance plans didn’t fully cover such treatment.

But when the pandemic struck, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services temporarily let hospitals bill for care outside their walls, including in patients’ homes. Many private insurers also are covering in-home hospital care during the pandemic. Hospital groups and others want Congress to make those changes permanent, at the same rates as in-hospital care.

Raphael Rakowski, co-founder of 4-year-old Medically Home, said the number of patients treated this July is up tenfold from July 2019.

“Our business is exploding because of COVID,” he said.

It now treats patients for 10 hospitals and one physicians’ group in five states, including two that were set up soon after the pandemic hit: Boston’s Tufts Medical Center and Adventist Health’s West Coast hospitals. Two Mayo Clinic hospitals joined this summer. Medically Home should be operating in 12 states by early 2021, Rakowski predicts.

He says some patients are offered at-home care after being examined in an emergency room. In other cases, doctors arrange the care for patients getting cancer treatment, those with a sudden illness, some about to get surgery, or homebound patients with dangerous complications.

The Veterans Health Administration operates 12 hospital-at-home programs. Last year, they served 1,120 veterans.

More vets are using the program during the pandemic, said Dayna Cooper, head of agency’s home-based programs. One of the busiest, in San Antonio, saw a 90% jump in veterans treated this March through June versus last year.

Another four of the agency’s 170 hospitals are working to start programs. Cooper said studies of the programs in Cincinnati and Honolulu found they cut costs by 29% to 38%, without differences in survival or hospital readmissions.

While interest in the programs has skyrocketed, whether in-home hospital care blossoms after the pandemic largely depends on whether government and private insurers continue to cover it at profitable prices.

If they don’t, Johns Hopkins’ Leff said: “I think most hospitals will go back to normal.”

reprinted courtesy AP Associated Press 8/21/20

Peter Gelsey
Wailea Makena Real Estate, Inc.
Maui, HI
www.petergelsey.com
direct (808) 344-8000
email peter@petergelsey.com
RB-19156  RB-19157