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Tag Archives: everyone is stupid
Never Like That Before
Okay, I’m over my Darth Vader bad mood spasm from this morning. Phoned health care and apparently they have some new convoluted system that’s designed confusing so as to maximally screw over its customers. Why be anonymous: it’s Pacificare. My appointment may or may not be covered depending on its code but I have to wait until the bill wends its way to the Portland Clinic and if still screwed up, I can then commence mouth-frothing and so forth. The notion that this appointment *might* still be covered cheered me up. Not like my employer hasn’t paid like $30 K in premiums over the past 10+ years when I’ve averaged less than one appointment per year. They should want me as a customer. That’s free money. All they have to do is slit open the envelope and run to the bank.
The unauthorized visa charge looks less promising. I called the company to ask about the charges because it’s not unheard of for us to charge something for “X” and then see a credit card charge billed as “Y” and be confused as to what we bought. I had to leave a message which doesn’t bode well so if I can’t speak to a live person tomorrow, I’m calling the credit union.
Onto the Chronicles of Riddick (very cool website, massive stuff to download, probably skip if don’t have speedy connection and/or patience of 8 year old boy). I have wanted to see this movie since I saw the trailer way back whenever they started showing it. It’s connected to Pitch Black — I guess a sequel but I thought I read somewhere it was a prequel. Whatever, not important to this discussion. It’s one of those movies that isn’t nearly as cool as it should be. But I still liked it. It’s one of those epic all over the universe sagas with Vin Diesel who I can’t help liking and one of the villians is Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR).
The better story is about the place where I saw it. I went to the $3 theater at the Portlander Inn which is a truck stop center at the last exit before the interstate bridge on the Oregon side. They have food, mini-mart, bar and live music, a TV area with tables, chairs and a snack bar and stuff like FedEx and lottery. I saw the movie with a room full of truckers. Since I’m the kind of person who watches all the Lord of the Rings and Dune and Star Wars stuff — I’m used to these strange otherworlds and massive info-dump in the first 5 minutes of the film type movies. The funniest thing was when the movie was over and I overheard a guy saying, “I’ve seen lots of strange things but I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Posted in doing it wrong
Tagged everyone is stupid, things I hate
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The Pro-Carb Way
This is a real story: US breadmakers hold crisis talks over impact of Atkins diet. I’m totally pro-carb if you’re wondering.
Please, Waste More Of My Time
This car thing is such a pain in the ass. I called Toyota today, naively thinking that I would make an appointment and my car would be returned to me as I last drove it. HA HA HA. I forgot about the part where the insurance dickers with the fixers. So I have to take it into Toyota tomorrow for an estimate after the insurance adjuster already did an estimate. This doesn’t sound good. I would really like to get the thing fixed because our current car distribution is not making either one of us happy.
Disconnect
Where have I been? A little low energy this week, we don’t need to go into that, but then the World Cup started so I’ve been caught up in that. I have been taping usually 2 games a night and I’m already behind but, you know, the weekend is coming. I feel like I am disconnected from everyone. Also I had a completely aggravating situation related to work which leads me to ask: does anyone care about doing a good job anymore? In this case “anyone” being a person employed by a government entity? Do people want to be helpful and competent? Because if they do, I’ve never met them. But aside from all that, things are decent. I got a shave ice (watermelon and green apple) at the Rose Festival yesterday and then a 25 ¢ foot massage — which is this plastic easy chair where you put in a quarter and set your feet on this metal platform and it vibrates like a jack hammer for a couple of minutes. I wouldn’t call it relaxing. I, of course, wondered if anyone would mind if I sat on it.
Meanwhile, read this hilarious story: Star Wars II Cereal: General Mills Gets It All Wrong. My favorite quote: “I realize it’s not always easy to produce a reasonable facsimile of a person or object when you’re reducing them to a tiny morsel of corn starch and gelatin, but it doesn’t look like General Mills was even trying.”
Hear That Noise?
argh Have you ever had to deal with a government agency? Well, at work I have to do this all the time and based on my experiences I find it hard to believe that this country runs at all. I needed to track down information on this government program which took me *9* contacts — phone calls transferred here and there and then routed to a website and I contacted that person by email who directed me to a different person by email who directed me to another website. Okay, so I have the correct website but gee, NONE of the links work. So I contact the web admin and *get this* I need to UPGRADE my web browser to view the friggin information. Hear that noise? That’s me screaming my head off.
This is a GOVERNMENT agency. Their job is to make this information available. They aren’t trying to sell a Porsche. They’re not Dreamworks. They are a friggin government agency and I should not have to do ANYTHING in order to access this information. And while I’m on the subject I have to say that about 90% of the government websites I visit are ugly, have horrible download times and are often confusing to navigate.
WHAT ARE PEOPLE THINKING?
Billy’s computer went down at the office and after making some calls, I talked to a computer repair place that told me it sounded like a hardware problem and that I could buy a new harddrive and replace the drive myself.
“I’m not very techno,” I explained, honestly, “Do you think I could do it?”
“Oh sure,” he said. “It’s not that hard.”
he guy who sold me the drive also said it would be easy to install. What rope are these guys smoking? It took me half the morning to figure out how to get the old drive out and now I still can’t get the thing to work. Something’s screwy with the IDE cables and I tried numerous configurations and basically the computer won’t recognize the cd drive and the new drive at the same time. A friend said that I have a master/slave problem and the [expletive] documentation, of course, doesn’t match anything in reality.
Can you imagine if someone called me and said, “I’m not much of a cook but I can heat up a can of soup, do you think I could make ravioli from scratch, and sauce from scratch and apple pie from scratch?” And me going, “Oh yeah, sure no problem, it’s a snap.”
Shouting and Arguing
[Expletive] I can’t swear because I’m at work and it costs me a quarter. I just typed a whole huge thing and then resized my window because I can’t friggin scroll and now my words have gone. What a world.
My story was a complaint about how I wanted to go to this lecture at a bookstore and they expected me to pay right this second to reserve my seat and this basically rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not like it’s the Crown Prince of Swaziland giving the lecture. I told them to forget it.
Also some charming guy called the office today to sell us DSL and I explained that with our current setup DSL isn’t going to work and he was like, shouting and arguing with me. He keeps telling me that his tech will come in and install the new modem to our network. I say, “What is it about ‘we don’t have a network’ that you’re not understanding?” “Ma’am,” he shouts, “That’s what I’m telling you. My tech will come in and install it.” His tech is going to install our network? How much you want to bet that his tech gets here and either (a) can’t do it; or (b) can do it but it will cost about a million dollars? I finally told him I was working on a time sensitive project and didn’t have time to argue with him.
I guess I am a little irritable today.
