So when Apple CEO Steve Jobs faced the nation to announce what he was going to do for unhappy iPhone 4 customers, my 20 years of public relations experience kicked in.

The issue, in a nutshell, was that some iPhone 4 users experienced dropped calls when they held the phone in a certain way. The media were outraged, comedians were delighted, and parodists had a field day with this perceived crack in Apple’s flawless façade.

The world breathlessly awaited Steve’s reaction. He called a news conference, donned his trademark black turtleneck and blue jeans, and began his multimedia presentation, which was broadcast live on CNN.

As a former PR person who has been tasked with avoiding scandals, explaining booboos, and verbally turning flaws into features, I had a particular interest in the much-anticipated performance. Add in the fact that I am a Mac Addict and iPhone 4 user and you’ll understand why I was riveted.

As I watched the news conference on my Macbook, Steve Jobs, incredibly, broke every rule there is about addressing a consumer PR issue. He minimized the problem (even demonstrating other smart phones’ similar issues), offered statistics about the tiny, even miniscule, percentage of iPhone users reporting the problem, and blamed the media for trying to tear down Apple. He kept using the word “Antennagate.” He repeatedly stressed that Apple’s engineers were “working their asses off” to make and perfect their products.

At the end, he stated that they wanted every iPhone user to be happy, and so the company was offering a free case to every user, and refunds to those who had already bought one of the cases, purported to solve the issue that is either a teeny, tiny problem blown totally out of proportion, or a mistake of global magnitude that would bring about the end of civilization as we know it, depending on whom you asked.

So, today I ordered my free case (there’s an app for that) and continued to put the blame for my own dropped calls squarely on the real reason for them – the lousy service from AT&T.

Still, I can’t get over the PR blunder that Jobs made. Obviously, his own PR people have given up and let Steve be Steve, and usually that works. This time, though, I wish I could have given him some outsider input.

Here’s how his statement would have gone:

“Here at Apple, we’re all about making our customers happy. It’s the foundation of our company – making products that work well, are beautiful, and are a joy to use.

Recently, there have been reports that a few iPhone customers are unhappy with the issue, endemic to smartphones, that causes a drop in service if you put your finger over the gap between antennas.

We have tracked the number of users reporting this problem to Apple at .55 percent. So even though 99. 45 percent of iPhone users do not have this problem with their phones, we want to make it right for all of our users.

Therefore, we are offering a free case for the iPhone 4, which will immediately prevent the issue that a few users are concerned with.

We stand by our products, which our customers seem to love. We are here to say, we love you back.

Thank you.”

I would have made him rehearse and I would cut him off at the knees if he had used any of the following words: stunned, antennagate, algorithm, or “grip of death.”

Steve, I love your products and your company. But you need to listen to your PR folks. If they didn’t tell you that you sounded self-righteous, fire them.

If you’re looking for some straight-up advice, I can be in Cupertino in 37 minutes. Give me a call.

© 2010 Mary Hanna

caught offguard

Has this ever happened to you? Someone sends you a candid photo they took of you and you get a glimpse of how others see you. The camera doesn’t lie, but you’ve learned to make it fib a little when you pose for photos. You jut out your chin to disguise your wattles, open your eyes wide to hide you droopy lids, suck in your stomach, square your shoulders, and turn your best side to the camera, much as you do to the mirror every morning. We all do it—if we didn’t fool ourselves about how we look we’d never go out of the house.

Then, someone catches you unaware and you see yourself as you appear to the rest of the world. It’s humbling, and sometimes shocking.

I am very good at fooling myself. In fact, I’m a world-class chump when it comes to believing my own lies. Here’s an example of my capacity for self-delusion. Reading a catalog the other day, I was excited to see that Bohemian chic is back in style, even though the last time I wore hippie clothes I was 40 years younger, 50 pounds lighter, and had 60% more hair. In my mind, I look like the catalog model – tall and thin with hair like Jean Shrimpton in a 1968 edition of Seventeen magazine.

The reality of how we look, as horrifying as it is, is nothing compared to facing our true age and the perceptions of others about that number.

It’s the kind of thing that hits you when you’re not looking. You’re at the doctor’s office, she’s lecturing you about the need for a colonoscopy and all of a sudden you think, “Oh! I could be her mother.” Not in a creepy way—like you had a child you misplaced or something—but in a startling way, like her diploma says “Stanford School of Medicine, Class of 1998.”

These little flashes of reality are easy to shoo away as we go on our merry way toward the inevitable stint in our death bed, but others are harder to dismiss: the signs that our friends and family are getting older.

I may be still young and hip, but my husband’s hair is turning white and he has a birthday this month that Paul McCartney immortalized in song. If you’d like to know, the answers to the musical questions are: yes I’ll still need you, and yes, I’ll still feed you.

Oddly enough, my son is aging as well. He recently turned 35, a birthday I used to consider the gateway to middle age. Of course, I’m middle-aged, so it’s not possible that he’s even an adult yet. When I was his age, he was already 12 years old. I shared this fact with him just to watch him freak out. Hey, why should I be the only one eating a reality sandwich?

In spite of the empirical evidence in candid photos, the constant querying by sales clerks about my eligibility for senior discounts, and the fact that all around me, friends and family are growing older, I somehow manage to stay the same.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And if you have any candid photos of me, burn them.

I have two sons, three years apart, and my child-raising years were full of adventures like tiptoeing through a minefield of Hot Wheels and Legos in the middle of the night, breaking up wrestling matches, and searching under beds for dirty underwear on laundry day. (If you have to ask why it was hidden under the bed, you’ve never had boys.)

I always suspected that it would have been different with girls. Last weekend I had the chance to find out.

Keeper and I have been wanting to visit the California Academy of Sciences ever since it opened. We’ve followed the rave reviews, read about the four-story rainforest contained therein, and made vague plans for a field trip there sometime in the future, maybe when relatives visit.

Our excuses for putting off our museum visit were threefold: the challenge of parking in Golden Gate Park, fear of militant parents with giant baby strollers, and the dread of our arches falling sometime in the third hour of exhibit-gazing.

Finally, I hit upon a plan that promised to outweigh all our objections to taking a field trip to the Cal Academy. “Let’s take the girls!” I said to Keeper, and he readily agreed that taking kids along would make it much more fun.

Now, you may be wondering if we have female grandchildren we haven’t told you about. No, no – I don’t keep any secrets from you, except maybe the true number of times I have wished death upon people cutting in front of me on 101. That’s between me and Father Stephen.

The girls—Jenny and Melissa—are my student and her sister, ages 11 and 9. I started working with Jenny as her tutor through Project Read and soon fell in love with her smart, sassy self and her little sister as well.

I help Jenny with her reading and pronunciation (English is her second language) every Thursday night. Sometimes we do worksheets or homework, and sometimes we just talk. In our chats, I have learned much that I never knew about kids and their challenges today, and I have come to admire Jenny’s steadfast sense of right and wrong as she sees her classmates cheat, lie, and set fires in the cafeteria. She tells stories about fights on the playground that end in “I stayed out of it.” The same stories, told 20 years ago by my boys, would have been concluded with, “And you should have seen his nose gushing blood!”

Jenny and Melisa are polite, quiet, and delightful. They are girls.

We gained their parents’ permission to take them to the museum and picked them up at their home on Saturday.

On the way up the San Francisco Peninsula, there was silence from the back seat except for timid answers to our questions: No, they had never been to Golden Gate Park. Yes, they were afraid of snakes. No, they had never seen penguins.

There were no fights in the back seat. There was no burping contest during lunch. There was no shoving, pushing or other foolishness in the aquarium. There was no threatening to push a sister over the railing at the top of the rainforest. There was some mild snickering over the question of whether bats poop upside down.

On the way home, in the midst of a daydream about how much easier it would have been raising girls, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw arms flailing.

My kids used to call the game Slug Bug. The rules of play? Whoever spies a Volkswagen first gets to punch the other one. Melissa appeared to be ahead.

It was somehow reassuring to discover that in some ways, kids are all alike.

© 2010 Mary Hanna

Here’s what’s dropped out of my brain lately. You might want to put on some rubber gloves.

Why, oh why is it a rule that real estate ads must include a photo of the agent? I don’t care what the agent looked like 15 years ago – show me pictures of the house. There are some agencies that even put the agent’s photo on the “for sale” sign. According to one such sign on my street, there will be an open house next Sunday, hosted by a big-haired lady who will be time-traveling from the ‘80s to earn her commission. Either that, or flying in from Texas.

I’m not from Texas, I’m from San Carlos, and Facebook knows this all too well. It’s creeping me out that the ads that show up in the right sidebar are so specific to my profile. Check this one out: “58-year-old San Carlos mom has lost 27 pounds on the new Knitting diet!” Wait, is that me? Very disturbing.

I also get offers for an astonishing array of wrinkle creams. In a lovely bit of irony, while I was writing this paragraph, I got a Facebook friend request from someone named Debbie Dawson, who’s written a book called ‘Do-it-yourself Facelift.” I hope it doesn’t involve a scalpel.

A 40-something friend was insulted that Facebook marketers assumed she would be interested in finding single men over 50. She prefers to be a cougar while she can get away with it. Perhaps if she updated her profile to include the words “I like them young and hot” she would get more targeted results.

Speaking of young and hot (how’s that for a smooth segue?), whenever we see a particularly hunky guy on TV, Keeper likes to ask me, “Who’s sexier, me or that guy?”

Ladies, if this happens to you, remember that the correct answer is never “That other guy.” Just like the correct answer to your question, “Do these jeans make my butt look big?” is never “Yes.”

In contrast, the answer to the question “Wanna meet me for lunch?” is always “yes.” I said just that last week when my son Jason called. (OK, I had to ask him first; he was just setting the date.)

Jason has just returned from a business trip to India, and I asked him to tell me the moat surprising thing he saw. He told me that story of his flight from Dubai to Bangalore. When the Emirates jet was about to land, the crew announced that the plane could not land in India unless it was “disinfected,” Then in a stunning move, the flights attendants walked up and down the aisles, misting passengers and cabin with something from large aerosol canisters. The cabin was full of fog, passengers were coughing and sputtering, and Jason got his first clue that he wasn’t in California anymore.

That concludes the Randomness Report for Friday, March 26. See you next time.

Second Half is a running commentary on everyday life for Baby Boomers and those who love them.

It has been hailed as “hysterical, sophisticated, biting, thought-provoking, and just plain funny.”

The column explores such things as what to do when your child comes home with a tattoo; how to make orthopedic shoes sexy; and the key to a happy marriage (low expectations).

Published in six Bay Area newspapers from 2004-2009, the column is now exclusively available online.

Let’s face it, Valentine’s Day is fraught with peril.

First, there’s the age-old man-woman problem of unexpressed (and therefore unfulfilled) expectations. You know how this goes – SHE expects a gift, a romantic gesture, a little extra cuddling, and HE walks in the door with new recycling bins he found on sale at Home Depot. Mayhem ensues, ending with his plea from the couch where he’ll be spending the night: “You never told me Valentine’s Day was important to you!”

To which I say, baloney! If she is female, Valentine’s Day is important to her. When she says, “Don’t get me anything this year” she doesn’t mean it. When she says “You shouldn’t have,” she is lying. I can’t believe that men continue to fall into the same trap every year. Listen up, guys. Get her a gift and make it good.

Now, long-time followers of the Hanna marriage will remember the tales of Valentine’s Day Debacles: gifts not purchased, bouquets that triggered allergies, last-minute offers of dinner dates with no advance reservations on the month’s busiest night.

Finally, we have solved the dilemma. Sometime prior to the fateful day, a package arrives on our doorstep. I open it, ooh and ahhh, and later inform Keeper of what he bought me for Valentine’s Day. I pick out exactly what I want and he gets the credit.

Now, when I was a young bride, I was not so laissez-faire. I took the absence of romantic gestures from both Keeper and Starter Husband to mean that I wasn’t lovable. Or I was married to a jerk. Either way, I was not a happy housewife.

Now that I’m a grown-up, I have accepted the fact that gifts don’t equal love.

But they don’t hurt, either. So whether or not your sweetheart is cool with ignoring the holiday (and you know she’s not), make an effort, gentlemen. You don’t want her to feel unloved.

And you don’t want to sleep on the couch.

Yet, we still make all sorts of assumptions about people based on little or no information.

Take Keeper, for instance. When we meet all those years ago, I took one look at him and my first thought was, “I’ll bet he teaches social studies.”

Now, the only basis I had for this judgment was the fact that he had a bad haircut and was wearing clothes that were at least 15 years out of date. I don’t know what pegged him as a teacher. With the haircut and the clothes he could have been a felon just released from the penitentiary.

As it turns out, he was still in prison, doing 10-to-life as a counselor.

Anyway, I do try to guard against making up stories about people I don’t know but it’s just so much fun. What else are you going to do with a long layover at an airport?

Two weeks ago, I had to confront the fact that I still harbor preconceptions about people. I was getting a mani/pedi, the one girly treat I allow myself. Usually, during my appointment I prefer to remain quiet, close my eyes, and relax.

On this day, however, the manicurist and I were alone in the shop and it seemed rude not to attempt a conversation.

“Do you have any children?” was my opening line.

“Oh, no!” she said. “I’m not married.”

That’s all it took. Tracy told me her whole life story.

Now, let me confess to my preconceptions. Based on the fact that she worked in a nail salon, I had assumed that she was Vietnamese and worked as a manicurist because she was uneducated. I was half right.

Tracy revealed that she had a degree in business administration, was a registered pharmacy technician, and was getting a second degree in Management of Information Systems from Cal State, Hayward. Her boyfriend, who was doing his residency at a local hospital, wanted to get married, but Tracy was in no hurry.

As she massaged my feet, we had a lively conversation about the merits of Windows vs. Mac operating systems and her desire to land a tech support job.

Some of what I learned played into my ingrained stereotype. She had a large family and they were all close. “Asians like to live near each other,” she said. She planned to live at home with her parents until she married.

Arranged marriages are still common in her culture. According to Tracy, “American men like Vietnamese women because they are faithful and happy to stay home and keep the house.” In fact, she had hooked up a former colleague with her cousin, who came over from Vietnam without having laid eyes on her fiancé, based solely on Tracy’s word that he was a good guy.

I left the salon buffed, polished, and ashamed to realize that I had felt more comfortable with Tracy filing my toenails when I unconsciously thought of myself as her superior. Snobbery is not a good look for me and I need to change it.

Now that my eyes have been opened, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out my newspaper carrier has a PhD.

Everyone has a story. Do you dare to ask?

The after-class conversations of my aqua aerobics buddies sometimes tend toward the subject of aging. Most of us are in our Second Half and are feeling the effects of time and gravity. That’s why we love to be in the pool – we can, for a moment, overcome the laws of physics and once again feel young and graceful. Our saggy parts bounce and our bouncy parts float. It’s enough to make us giddy.

Last week, in the after-glow our of wet workout, a group of us hung out, treading water and discussing our facial hair.

One of us, let’s call her Margaret, had just been to the dermatologist to discover the cause of her thinning eyebrows. Her formerly bushy brows were nearly gone, with just a few hangers-on marking the brow line. The loss, she explained, was a form of alopecia caused by inflammation. She had to apply a topical medication in hopes that her brows would grow back. If they didn’t, the doctor recommended cortisone shots in the eyebrow region. Margaret thought it was payback for the years she spent torturing her eyebrows with wax and tweezers.

The entire group cringed at the prospect of needles in the face; a free-flowing discussion about facial hair problems ensued.

If you’re over 40, you know that Mother Nature has a way of making us feel less feminine as we age, to put it politely. To put it more bluntly, we start to turn into our fathers.

Every single lady in our group is plagued with unruly facial hair. I’m not talking about downy fuzz. I’m talking big, black coarse hairs that sprout out of our chins. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t been greeted in our morning mirror by an inch-long, wiry hair that appeared overnight. It’s a frightening experience.

Some of us have mustaches, too, but I’m not qualified to discuss the merits of shaving over waxing or plucking, because, thank God, I’m still hairless Hanna when it comes to my upper lip (and my legs, too, but that’s a different story).

Our small focus group is, I think, fairly typical. Most women our age are plagued with the indignity of rogue hair growth and/or fallout. At worst, it offers a new career opportunity with the circus. At best, it’s a good excuse to visit your favorite salon.

But ladies, here’s the one thing that makes it bearable: being able to laugh about it with your friends.

“Wha??” Keeper sputtered, his face full of concern and confusion.

“Well, obviously I’m OK,” I added, “but it kind of shook me up.”

That’s the happy ending. Here’s the beginning and the middle.

I was on my way down El Camino to meet my friend at Café Barrone for a cup of tea and a chat.

About to enter the left turn lane at Ravenswood to swing back north to enter the parking garage, I heard sirens. In my rear-view mirror I saw a fire truck bearing down on me. I did what I was trained to do by Mr. Patacsil in Driver’s Ed class in 1968: I pulled over to the right, angling the car into the next lane.

The next thing I knew, the fire truck was screaming past me and caught the left rear of my car, bouncing me around and gouging the hell out of my bumper.

I was a bit disoriented but not too out of it to notice the engine number of the truck that perpetrated the hit and run.

I jumped out of the car to inspect the damage, only to be met by a honking, snarling driver who angrily swerved around me so as not to miss the green light.

I got back in the car and continued south. I passed the accident scene that was the cause of the commotion and I spied the aforementioned fire truck. I made a U-turn and parked a half-block from the accident, sitting for a few minutes to compose myself.

When I saw that the firefighters were packing up and getting ready to leave (another paramedic unit had responded first and had transported the victim to the hospital) I made my move.

“Uh, excuse me,” I said to the man in the fluorescent yellow vest. “You just hit my car.”

“What?” he said. “Where?”

I mentioned the intersection and he said, “Oh, man. We didn’t even feel that.”

“Well, I sure did,” I countered.

He inspected the car, told me to wait, and went to consult with his colleagues. While they were in conference, I tried to reach my friend to tell her I was delayed. (Zelda, if you’re reading this—keeping your cell phone at home on your desk is missing the whole point of having one.)

The trio of firefighters returned with a binder full of regulations and we began what was to be an hour’s worth of paperwork. Obviously, running into civilians is not uncommon, because there’s an official form for it.

While one guy copied my license, registration and insurance information, the others regaled me with tales of drivers who don’t bother to put down their cell phones, let alone pull over, for emergency vehicles. Seeing as how I was hit while obeying the law, I found this slightly ironic.

Nonetheless, I sympathized with the firefighters, who viewed the drivers’ behavior not as ignorance of the law, but as a sign that they just don’t care.

Despite my slight peevishness at having had my bumper mangled by a city vehicle, I felt a bond with these public servants. I kept thinking about how their brethren responded immediately and professionally the time Keeper collapsed at home, and how the boys at the Holly Street station gave Corky oxygen while they found us an emergency vet open on a Sunday night. These guys are heroes to me.

So, they misjudged how wide their truck was and clipped my bumper. No big deal.

Keeper, on the other hand, was not so forgiving. Normally quite a mellow fellow, my husband got himself a bit worked up imagining how I could have been flattened by an 8-ton truck. He wanted to report the police officer that made me tear up with his tough questioning, sue the city for reckless endangerment, and cuss out the driver of the truck for being careless.

I got him calmed down and he’s content to let the insurance companies battle it out.

Here’s the lesson for today: When you hear a siren or see flashing lights, pull over to the right as soon as you can safely do that. And if you still get your bumper clipped by emergency responders, don’t bust their chops. They’re just doing their job.

And when you tell your loved ones the story, start with the happy ending instead of the lurid headline.

Lately I’ve noticed (and a story in this morning’s Chronicle confirms) that people are using coffee shops as their office. These urban squatters move in, buy a single cup of coffee and proceed to occupy a chair for hours while they conduct business.

Shop owners are obviously concerned. Customers, the ones that actually buy stuff for cash, are squeezed out by these guys.

Here’s what happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I had arranged to meet a friend at a Starbucks in Burlingame, the one near the train station. I arrived a bit early, ordered a large Earl Grey (“Do you mean a grande?”) and scoped out seating possibilities. There was a Mom that looked like she was packing up the stroller, but she was just getting out a snack for her toddler.

By the window there was a guy in an upholstered chair with an empty seat beside him, but there was a good reason no one was sitting there, if you know what I mean. The fumes coming off of the guy were actually visible – he had little wavy lines surrounding him.

I settled in with my “Grande Earl, two bags” on a stool at a high table. My table companion churlishly gathered up his scattered papers and moved his laptop an inch to the left. He gave me a dirty look while trying to impress the person on the other end of his conversation with a monologue about market share, webinars, and sales projections.

I smiled in his direction while unabashedly claiming a piece of the 4-person table that Mr. Powerpoint believed was his and his alone.

When my friend arrived with a couple of shopping bags we took up a full half of the table. Mr. Bluetooth stiffened, harrumphed, and turned his back on us. Honestly, you’d think we had stormed uninvited into his private office to have our little tea party.

When we stated talking, he got up, abandoned his briefcase and laptop and stomped outside where he spent the next 30 minutes pacing and pontificating into his headset. We were glad to be spared his jargony jibba jabba, but had the uneasy feeling that we were supposed to guard his computer. I was tempted to send him an e-mail from his own account.

I asked another friend, who is currently a barista-in-training, about this new squatting phenomenon.

“We definitely have our regulars,” she said. “One guy comes in every day at 8:00 and stays until 11:00. It’s usually not too bad, but one day he had a conference with flip charts and everything. It was pretty annoying.”

Annoying? Yes, indeed. But also unfair—unfair to the business trying to make a buck, unfair to the customers needing a place to sit and sip, and unfair to the rest of us who just don’t care to hear the details of your global marketing strategy.

Next time, please get your grade double-shot low-foam whatever to go, and set up your office in your car where it belongs.