10 posts tagged “rant”

Okay.  So it's 6 PM on Saturday.  I'm watching College Football like every patriotic American with my family and a buddy.  We're hungry.  So we decide upon that most mainstream, American, and patriotic of meals:  we order pizza for delivery to our lazy fat patriotic asses.

Or, at least we try.

This is the story of my attempt to order pizza from Dominos this evening.

This being 2008 and years into the Internet era, I first went to dominos.com to place the order online.  This affront to patriotism tells me that my local store is "temporarily" not accepting Internet orders.  Annoyed, I resigned myself to having to actually interact with a human being, albeit on the phone.  In preparation for this very important phone call (what could be more important than acquiring sustenance?) I went back to the website in order to determine what we were going to order and how much it would cost.  You know, to make sure we had sufficient funds to cover the expenditure.  I know this is possibly quite un-American, given that the greatest American financial institutions do not follow this measure of responsbility, but that is a topic for another article.  To my frustration, the website insisted that I register in order to obtain this information.

So i went ahead and registered, despite now being thoroughly annoyed at the inconsiderate means with which Dominos would surely violate my privacy with the information that I had to give them.  After several minutes, we came to the conclusion of what to order and how much it would cost us (sort of, since we had to lie about which store we were "ordering" from since our pathetic local store was "temporarily" not accepting Internet orders (or any orders, as we would soon discover, at least from us)).

Armed with this information, I made the call to what appeared to be a local phone number.  Not only that, but a number which appeared to be unique to our store.  The recorded message that greeted me informed me that I could now place this order online!  Please go to dominos.com to do that!  Yes!  Please!  You complete imbiciles.  An automated system then asked me for my name and phone number, before passing me along to a "real" "human" "being."

My call was finally answered by somebody working in a call center.  The first question he asked me?  My phone number.  These people clearly value efficiency and have the utmost consideration for their customers' time.  After providing my number again, along with my address and, oh, what the hell, my name again...  why not? I was at last able to place my order.

At this point, thinking I had at last endured the last of the Dominos Trials for this evening, I prepared to have my order read back to me and to receive my total and estimated delivery time, along with perhaps a "thank you" or other meaningless pleasantry.

But that would have been waaaaaaay too easy and hardly worthy of a blog entry.

Instead, this fine call centerman informed me that he was having trouble obtaining my total.  And that he would transfer me over to the actual local store in order to complete my order.  You know, because having me just talk to someone in the store in the first place would have been un-American and inefficient.  I was placed on hold for a moment while this happened.

When a girl who must have failed kindergarten answered the phone, she had no idea why I was there.  Frustrated that Mr. Callcenterman had neglected to spare me this indignation, I had to spend several minutes just explaining what had happened.  I guess I could have just jumped right into placing my order, but I didn't want to have two orders or be charged twice or some other screw up.  And considering Callcenterman seemed as competent as my Sprint "customer" "service" "agents" I could assume nothing.

I was finally able to place my order with Failed Kindergarten Girl, who asked me for my phone number and address.  Again.  And...

Again.

and...

Again.

Yes, this individual asked me for this information three times.  Before I even placed my order.

While placing my order, she asked me to confirm that I wanted Buffalo Shit Kickers three, three, three times.

And then, while preparing to summarize my order, she repeated my phone number.  Incorrectly.

And then, she asked me for my address.  Again.

I declined to provide it.

Instead, I will never, ever, order from Dominos Pizza again.  An institution which has such poor judgment and incompetent personnel working for them should not be permitted to supply food to me, or anybody.  I'm having Pizza Hut delivered instead, for almost twice the price.  But in terms of value, it is a much better deal.

A little over a year ago, I underwent an utterly hellish process to stay loyal to Sprint and get a Motorola Q.  One day, I may document this on the blog, but not today.  I have all the e-mails saved, and the memory of the multitudes of phone calls with incompetent, undertrained, ineffective "customer" "service" "agents" will be forever seared into my memory...  I imagine that if I ever get Alzheimer's and forget my own name I will still remember the pain that this process caused.

You would think that enduring that kind of pain would net something worthy of the process.  Unfortunately, after a long year of continued frustration and just astonished, flabbergasted bewilderment, I now find it necessary to document all the ills of this phone.  I don't know if these problems are Motorola's fault, Sprint's fault, or Microsoft's fault, but frankly, I don't give a damn.  The phone is the technological equivalent of equine excrement, and every day it surprises me in some new way.  90% of the stress in my day comes from traffic, but the remaining 10% comes from my having to use the Motorola Q.

• First off, the hardware...  about the only good thing I can say about this phone is that it is built fairly solidly.  I've dropped it a couple of times and it's held up well.  Plus, the sexy black rubberized-for-your-pleasure finish is not only aesthetically pleasing but also functions to assist in grip.
• There is a set of maladies which I would like to characterize as "poor battery life," but that doesn't even begin to tell the story.  In fact, it's kind of misleading, because on a brand new battery, it was acceptable.  That is to say, on a full charge when the battery and phone were brand new, I could go an entire day with a little surfing, a little talking on the phone, and some SMS messages without having to worry too much.  Unfortunately, within 6 months, the battery life began to drop noticeably.  I am a fucking battery hound, period.  I am so anal about my batteries that I have a spreadsheet to track the charge that goes into each and every NiMH battery that I own (I have a special charger that lets me cycle each battery fully on every charge and track the energy put into every individual cell).  So don't tell me about how to properly take care of batteries.  My last phone, a Samsung Palm device, was still holding charge on its battery at a level indistinguishable from brand new 3 years later.  On the Q now, if I make it through a whole day without getting a low battery warning, I go and buy a lottery ticket because it's my fucking lucky day.
• What's even more frustrating is that the phone will literally turn itself off as if the battery died for no reason whatsoever, randomly.  I can be sitting there with 3 bars (out of 4) on the batt indicator, and five minutes later, I look at my phone, and it's fucking taking a personal day.  When I power it back on, it comes up with a random number of bars.  Sometimes, it's 3 like before it turned itself off, sometimes it gives me a low battery warning with 0 bars.  What a piece of junk.  I'd pick up a spare battery, but I refuse to give Motorola more money for a defective product.
• The "flash" on the camera must be short for "flashlight" because it is not a "flash" in the photographic sense of the word.
  
• Software-wise, it's just unbelievably buggy.  They couldn't even get something as fundamental as dialing right.  When you're on the "home" screen and press a number, it is supposed to put you into dialing mode.  The numbers you press show up at the top, and simultaneously, it brings up possible matches for the letters underneath out of your address book.  This is pretty standard for any mobile phone since, oh, I dunno...  1990?  But no, not on the Q.  Right now, as I type this rant, if I hit any number or letter from the "home" screen, what do I get?  My fucking calendar.
• Also, there is an entire friggin' qwerty keyboard on this phone.  You'd think you'd be able to dial 1-800-MOTO-SUX but no.  You have to translate the letters yourself and then dial the numbers.  How hard would it have been to include some "letter dialing" mode?  I mean, I don't even need it to be automatic.  I'd be fine with having to press alt- or shift- or whatever.  But no.  Nothing.
• Don't even get me started on IE.
• ActiveSync is neither active nor does it sync.  It is a royal pain in the ass to use, and frankly I doubt that 99% of people who don't have professional IT support have ever sync'd their Q's to their Windows machine.  And if you want to sync over Bluetooth, you might as well hit any number or letter on your Q to bring up your calendar so you can cancel your appointments for the next three days because that's how long it'll take you to figure that shit out.

I'll continue to post the misadventures I have with this phone, which I am convinced must be standard issue in Purgatory.  After all, I am locked into this contractually for another year thanks to the orifices which are the telcos.  But as long as I have to put up with this crap I might as well get my word in edgewise on it.

There are some people that not even The Easy Button can help...

I watched a lady this morning sit in her car, holding up a line of about 10 cars, because she could not figure out how to press a button.  I am not kidding.

She was trying to enter a parking garage, and all she had to do was press the button on the ticket dispenser so that that gate would raise and she could enter the lot.  Like just about every other pay by the hour parking garage in the entire world.  I watched as I walked past (thank goodness I was walking and not stuck behind her) her, an utterly hollow expression having overtaken her being.

I felt very sorry.  Not for her, but for all the people in society that have to put up with her.  At that moment, it was only those 10 people behind her, but they couldn't have been the only ones she'd touched in an entire lifetime thus far of confused existence.

By the time I had walked beyond sight of her, she had not moved nor had the expression on her face changed.

I attended the Mariners game last night, in the second best seats I've ever had at Safeco Field.  We were in the 30th row in section 122, which is right behind 1st base.  Great seats, from a seating chart perspective.

My usual seating is much more humble:  I like to save a few bucks and get the 300-level seating.  Preferably right behind home plate, but really anywhere is fine.

Curiously, I noticed something very interesting as I sat there in my nice seat, close to the action, last night.  The people around me were very different.  I know, I know, it's wrong of my to generalize based on such a small sample, but I just can't help it.  There were some pretty hardcore fans around, sure.  But I noticed something else:  my view of the action was being interrupted far more frequently.  So despite having much better sight lines onto the field, I kept having to stand up or crane my neck around to actually see what was going on.

Some of this was caused by the plethora of concessions vendors walking up and down the aisle.  It makes perfect sense, really:  these seats are about four times more expensive than the 300-level seats.  So the people that buy these seats are probably more willing to part with their cash for some hot dogs, "COLD beer, Mike's Hard Lemonade, water!" and Shishkaberries.  Yeah.

But more annoying was the constant flow of people up and down the aisle, during the action.  I mean, I have no problem with people getting up to go to the bathroom between innings.  Or people going for a slice of pizza when there's a major lull (and it's a baseball game, right, so it's not like there is a shortage of lulls).  But I swear...  the M's had two men on, tying run at the plate with the pitch on the way...  and people were friggin' blocking my view because they were going up the aisle.  And I'm not talking about one person.  I'm talking about a flow of people...  enough to make a small traffic jam directly in my line of sight.  And it's not like they were half-trying to watch the game while half-trying to go up the aisle to wherever they were going...  they were downright not paying attention to the game.

Dude, if you go to a friggin' baseball game, at least try to watch the goddamn game.  Or at the very least, get the hell out of my way so I can.  I mean, it doesn't get much more suspenseful in baseball than the situation I just described.  If you don't care, then why are you there?  Sheesh.

Yeah, I could understand if it was just one isolated instance.  But this went on all game long.  And I hate to say it, but I blame the socio-economic status of these people for their utter disregard of the game.  These people are the very definition of posers.  They were at the game because it was something to do with their money.  Ugh.  What amazes me is that there were some pretty hardcore fans that just put up with this.  I guess they just try to block it out.

Thanks but no thanks.  I'm going to stick with the 300-level from now on.  The hardcore guys are still there (just didn't spend as much to be there), but in my humble experience, there are far fewer posers up there.  I think the low price weeds 'em out...

Okay, so there's been some coverage nationally about the predatory nature of the "payday loan" industry.  How it targets poor people and military bases, and that sort of thing.  It's really easy to make an example of this situation because the unfairness seems so clear:  I mean, you've got these opportunistic predators preying on these poor, hard working people!  Oh no!  Something must be done to punish these predators!

But that's the easy way out, a myopic view of the big picture.

Just remember Jet's 2nd Law of Evil:  Banks are Evil.

The real, underlying problem here is that "mainstream" (Yes, feel free to apply every connotation of that word as previously discussed in my blog) banks refuse to extend these people a branch in their time of need.  That famous saying "a bank don't lend you money 'til you don't need it no more" is so very true.  The evil banks have decided that these Americans are not worth their trouble, so these people have nowhere else to turn for credit, and in desperation, they have to go to the predators who lie in wait.  All these predators have done is recognized that someone else has created a desperate situation that they can take advantage of.

The real solution to the problem lies not in punishing payday loan outfits for charging exorbitant fees, or by shutting them down.  The real solution is to punish mainstream banks for turning their greedy backs on hard working Americans.

"The Visa Halftime Show, brought to you by Visa."

In other words,

"We think you are dumb.  We think you are dumb."

So another thing that happened with this latest Vox update is that my non-public photos stopped loading.  Of course this was only happening to me, and not my friends, so I thought it was quite strange.  After some diagnosis, I figured out that this was somehow caused by my refusal to allow cookies that do not originate from the site.  WTF?  Why Vox needs to do this to show my photos is very strange, and disturbing.

Cookies, like all good things, can be used for such horrible and evil purposes when in the wrong hands.  I restrict their use on my browser more than the vast majority of people.  But when I think about it, I shiver at the thought of millions and millions of people "freely" giving up their privacy just beacuse they are ignorant and/or lazy.

Cookies are the reason why I use Firefox.  Firefox is the only browser that gives me fine control over the use of cookies on my browsing experience.  I only allow cookies to be set for a single session, and I only allow them to be set from the site that I am visiting, not any other site (because this is usually some marketing/advertisement site that sets cookies for the purpose of invading your privacy, most of the time, without your knowledge, much less consent).

There are cookies that I want for longer, but they are few and far between.  In fact, I allow these specifically by name when and if I come across one.  Cookies that store my preferences on a site, for example.

The way cookies are used by marketing and advertising companies on the web is so insidious it makes me sick.  They take advantage of the fact that 99.99999% of users out there don't even know what they are or what they do, and of course, how they can be used to invade their privacy.  They justify their own sick actions by saying that they collect information with the users' consent.  This is, of course, a crock of horse manure, since the passive consent that most users give is not really consent at all.  Legally, this is covered by EULAs (end-user licensing agreements) that basically say "you agree to everything we're gonna do to you the moment you click onto our website."  Some EULAs even prohibit users to turn off cookies!

So it's with a level of great despair that I find Vox requiring me to mess with my cookies just to show my pictures.  What on earth is up with that?

So Vox went and made some "improvements" to the interface.  The most noticeable thing is that they widened the layout of all pages.  This is rather unfortunate, in my humble opinion.

While I agree that the 3-column layout that I had been using was a little narrow in the middle "main" column, I would say that the ideal case would be to allow dynamic resizing of the main column, where all the "featured" content is.  Talking with a good friend of mine well-versed in CSS matters, I discovered that it is impossible to implement this ideal cleanly.  Shame on CSS.

Okay, so I thought, fine...  I'll just switch to a 2-column view so that my users can retain the power of sizing their browser width to their own liking.  Nope, sorry, denied!  The 2-column view now uses the same total width as the 3-column.  Which is ridiculous because it means the main column is way too wide AND we don't save any space.  Bleh.

So here we are, a compromise that is most unfortunate...  I've switched to the 3-column view where the main column is on the far left and the secondary columns (that used to straddle the main column) are now both on the right.  That means that you can still size your browser window according to taste, and if you are too narrow, you'll just cut off the most useless of the 3 columns instead of something more important.

This is one of the unfortunate ways that one has to relinquish control when they don't host their blog on their own server.  It's still worth the not having to deal with all the server issues, but what would be nice is if we were given some of that control back in later revisions of the interface.

As a footnote, I want to clarify why I am making a bigger deal out of this browser width issue than one might think is worth making a big deal about.  I'll use an analogy:  the American automotive industry.  Screen size (and browser width, as a matter of course) is on that constant march upward, just like the average size of the passenger vehicle.  Everyone wants an SUV, everyone wants a 20" LCD with 1600x1200 resolution.  Hey, I don't drive an SUV, but I do drive an Altima, which, if you compare my model to the one from 5 years ago, is something like 30% bigger.  It's ridiculous.  My Altima is bigger than Maximas from five years ago.

Incidentally, I do have a "big" screen as my main work screen...  I drive two monitors on my main machine, 1680x1050 and 1024x768.  This does not mean I want my browser window to take up 1680x1050.  I have a big screen so I can have my browser window neatly on half of the screen (this is approximately an 800 pixel width for the usable space of the browser), and then I can have a myriad of other windows–depending on what I'm working on–on the other half of my main screen.  And the secondary screen I like to use for "status" windows, and chat, etc.

Like the automotive industry, rather than making better use of the space we have, the Internet industry seems to believe that they should just take over any and all screen real estate available.  Good designers used to design their pages so that even someone on a 640x480 monitor could have an acceptable user experience.  Then it moved to 800x600.  And now, it's up to 1024x768.  Basically, websites like Vox are increasingly demanding that people with 1024x768 resolution monitors run their browsers at full screen.  This is obnoxious.

The right way to do this would be to make your site enhanced for people who choose to give their browsers more width, but never, ever to cut off the edges of a page just because someone either chooses not to run their browser at 1000 pixel width or who just can't run their browser that big because they only have an 800x600 capable monitor.

I picked on the automotive industry, but this is pretty much true in all things American.  Houses, for example.  I live in a house built in the 1920's.  It's a huuuge house, by my standards, and by the standards of the 1920's.  It's about 1600 square feet.  People raised extended families in these houses.  People in other countries would probably consider this house suitable for 5 or 6 families.  My parents, by contrast, had their house built in 1989, and their house is 3400 square feet.  Let me just say, no family, even of 5 or 6 or 8, needs that much space.  And my understanding is 3400 is probably hovering around upper-middle average these days.  It's obnoxious.  Bloat.

Let's at least stop the bloat in the one space we can:  on our blogs!

P's entry about his travels in Malaysia reminded me of something that came up the last time I was out of the country:  in many countries the credit card companies are now requiring that only cards with smart chips be accepted.  That means if you have one of the 1950's vintage technology cards that only has a magnetic stripe for encoding information, you're out of luck.

Problem is, I don't believe I've seen any US-issued cards with the smart chip.  My Blue Amex has one, but apparently it's not used in the same way because it never worked at any of the vendors I tried it with.

So what gives?  C'mon US card issuers, get with the program!  Don't advertise how priceless it is to be everywhere I want to be when, in fact, you're not.  There are fewer things more frustrating than not having my form of payment work like it's supposed to.  If you're going to force us into your program, then you'd better at least make sure it works.  Otherwise, I'm sticking with cash.

I want to see just one new release "blockbuster" movie from a major studio that does not incorporate computer generated images.

You know, I was really excited about the use of computers to enhance the movie experience when CG was a fairly new concept.  And of course, it would be wrong of me not to support the general "industry" of computer artists and engineers... being that I know so many people that are directly or indirectly involved.

But I've seen so many movies, and ten times as many trailers, where the CG is just way over the top.  Like the whole movie was pretty much shot on blue screen and everything was done post-production.  I mean, seriously...  why bother with actors, a director, and a cinematographer?  I really liked some of the epic stories where the scenery and backdrops told so much of the story... because they were real.  Even the early CG efforts at least tried to remain faithful to some real thing or idea.

Case in point are Episodes I-III of the Star Wars saga.  I finally gave in and saw Episode III last week, and probably my biggest complaint was how unnecessary most of the CG was.  Episodes IV-VI were so good in part because of the amazing choice of locations.  In the newer trilogy, I think Lucas wanted to convey a sense of otherworldliness through the CG.  But in making the CG so over the top and so thick throughout the movie, it just made everything feel fake and contrived (remember, I'm not talking about the script, I'm talking about the scenery and animated sequences).  The locations in IV-VI helped to draw the audience into the story by immersing them in these lush, beautiful environments.  The CG "locations" in I-III made me feel like I was watching someone play a video game.

Then yesterday I saw Pirates of the Caribbean:  Dead Man's Chest.  I know it's supposed to be over the top and fantasy and all.  But I must have just been in the wrong mood in terms of wanting to see CG, because I spent most of the movie just annoyed at how the whole industry has given up on real filmaking in favor of making animated features with "real actors" inserted to get box office draw.  It's like I'm watching the reverse of Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Howard the Duck in every single movie.  I mean, there's a time and place for it, but not in every single movie that comes out.  And certainly not as thick as in all the "blockbusters" this summer.  It's just too much.