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NaBloPoMo Day 18

I would like to share with you some of the things you do that piss me off.

First, you autoplay a video or some music when I go to your site.  Don’t do that.  What if I’m surfing the web at Oh-Dark-Thirty?  I don’t need your noisy website to wake up the rest of the household and, incidentally, scare the crap out of me.  What if I’m surfing the web at work and listening to my happy music?  Do you really think I want to hear YOUR crap over my happy music?  Oh, no.  I do not.  Just stop doing this.  It’s obnoxious, and it’s rude.

Next, you decide you know what the best size is for my browser, and shrink it down to something really small.  What the hell is up with that?  I like my browser to be big, bold and FULL SCREEN, damn it.  Stop mucking around with my settings.  That’s obnoxious, rude and verging on criminal.

Lastly, you have pop-up dialog box after pop-up dialog box jumping out to nag me about leaving your evil, stupid, ugly site.  What the fuck is wrong with you???  Be assured that whatever product you are hawking, I will never buy it.  I will also never voluntarily return to your website.

These practices are, in my opinion, the sign of someone who is completely unprofessional.  If these practices are your clients’ ideas, then it behooves you to tell them how much they are pissing of their potential customers.  Grow a spine and just say No.

Regards,
Kelly

Filed by Kelly at 6:33 am under Rant
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NaBloPoMo Day 17

Yesterday morning, I spent about 15 seconds grabbing an empty can that had been rolling around in the back of my car for several days and tossing it in one of the recycling bins in the garage.  Had I not done that, the SUV that sped though the red light at the intersection of Lincoln and McKinley would have plowed into me.  That would have been really inconvenient, to say nothing of the fact that neither I nor my car would have been very happy about it.

And yo!  Where are the Albany cops when you need them, eh?  Because that’s not the first time I’ve seen someone ignore red lights on Lincoln.  It was, however, the first time I’d seen somebody going that damn fast through the red light, though.  Too bad I didn’t catch a license plate number.  Sigh.  Next time, asshole.  Next time.

Filed by Kelly at 6:40 am under Rant
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NaBloPoMo Day 13

So, I understand that there is Christianist group boycotting the Gap and Old Navy and Banana Republic because they won’t say “Christmas” in their ads.  Excuse me while I try to stop laughing…

There are a couple of reasons why this is just insane.  And funny.  First of all, the number of people who would actually participate in such a boycott is so small that the stockholders of the Gap et al. are probably snickering in their eggnog.  The number of people participating in the boycott will probably be quite easily offset by the number of people purposefully shopping at the Gap et al. because they think the boycott is uber silly.

The second reason why this is insane is really more relevant.  I assume that these Christianist folks are trying to put the “Christ” back in “Christmas.”  What they don’t understand is that Capitalism has co-opted Christmas just as thoroughly as the early Christians co-opted various Pagan winter holidays.  Christmas no longer has a meaning beyond rampant over-spending.  Christmas is no longer a holiday… it’s a Time of Year.  The entire fourth quarter of every year is devoted to Christmas.  Americans are still pushing back a little and insisting that Thanksgiving is still a holiday… but it is quickly being overshadowed by the marketing swill of Christmas.

I have profound reasons for disliking this time of year that I may (or may not) share at some point.  The fact that Big Business has turned it into their major retail event of the year certainly doesn’t help anyone (except Big Business) love it.

My advice for the Christianists (not that they’ll listen to me since I’m not a Christian) is to just quietly celebrate Christmas as the birthday of Jesus, just as you always did before it became the biggest reason of the year for overspending.  I’d actually like Christmas more if it was low-key and laid back.  I’d be able to appreciate it as your religious holiday.  Really guys… you don’t want to be part of the madness.

Bah humbug.

Filed by Kelly at 6:55 am under Rant
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NaBloPoMo Day 10

Know what I hate?  I hate ads that pop up and cover my entire screen.  Even more, I hate ads that pop up and cover my entire screen while making noise.  I do not like the people who make these things up, and believe they are sadists.  During the Middle Ages, they would have worked for the Inquisition as torturers.

Oh, and websites that nag you to stay there?  Yeah, hate you even more.

Filed by Kelly at 7:21 am under Rant
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NaBloPoMo Day 4

I don’t work in a grocery store.  I never have.  Undoubtedly, I am too sensible and incredibly overqualified.  But I shop a lot, and I’ve noticed that the people who work in grocery stores don’t get very good training.  It’s possible they’re shown how to use the scanner/cash register.  Ok, I’d say it’s likely that they’re trained on that piece (those pieces?) of equipment.

But who teaches them how to bag groceries?  You’d think something like that would just be common sense, but since most of the people who do that job don’t possess common sense, somebody needs to teach them.  No matter how you arrange things in those dumb plastic bags, if you put my bunch of bananas in the same bag as my loaf of bread, the bread is going to get squished.  But I bring along my handy cloth tote bags, so that shouldn’t be an issue.  And it usually isn’t.  However, just because my bag is big enough to hold my entire grocery order, that does not mean you need to fill the thing up so that it weighs more than a small child.  Yes, yes!  Those 12 cans of soup will fit in the bag.  But even the stupid bagger can’t lift it… why should it make sense that I would be able to lift it?

One other thing.  Don’t put the people who suffer from Diarrhea of the Mouth at the checkout area.  When the cashier and the bagger are babbling incessantly with each other every single time I go into their lane, that  is rude.  I don’t want you to babble at me either… but continuing your fascinating conversation about your coworkers (rude in any case) and pretending the customers aren’t even there makes me want to smack you upside your head with the bag you just filled with 12 cans of soup.  Just saying.

Filed by Kelly at 10:07 am under Rant
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And my Russian friends are awesome people.  But you idiots who are spamming me from Russian domains?  Yeah, you suck.  You just need to go away.  Stop asking your ridiculous questions, stop trying to make inane comments that have no bearing on anything I’ve ever posted on this blog (or any of my other blogs), stop with the comments that are nothing but two dozen links in a Cyrillic font.  Good grief… grow up.  And go away.

Thank goodness for Akismet.

Filed by Kelly at 6:22 am under Rant
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Why do you want me to install updates every 48 hours?  Why?  Once a week should be WAY more than enough.  But no.  I install updates, and two days later there that annoying exclamation point in a shield on my Sleep button, yelling at me that pressing the ever-so-handy Sleep button will not send my laptop to sleep.  No, no… instead, pressing the no-longer-handy-at-all no-longer-Sleep button installs updates and then shuts down my computer.  This would not be a completely bad thing if it only happened once or twice a month… but every TWO DAYS??

Why, Microsoft?  WHY, for the love of all that’s holy??

This Vista nonsense was not a good idea.  Damn you, Microsoft.

Filed by Kelly at 5:54 pm under Rant
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I just hate UPS this week.  Most of the time, they deliver my packages on time, and with great courtesy.  Not this week, though.

Last week, I ordered a book from Amazon.  I needed this book to complete a project at work.  It was supposed to arrive at my house on Monday or Tuesday of this week… plenty of time to complete the project by noon on Friday.

When I didn’t receive the package by Tuesday evening, I check the tracking information Amazon sent me.  According to that information, UPS had attempted to make the delivery on Monday and on Tuesday, but couldn’t manage to find my house.  They claimed that Amazon had given them the incorrect address.

Let’s start with the first rant.  I have been successfully receiving deliveries from Amazon the entire time I have lived in this house (over four years).  So the address Amazon has is 100% correct.  This house is extremely large so it’s pretty hard to miss.  The address is affixed to the front door in large numbers that can easily be read from across the street (unless one has problems seeing, but even New York State wouldn’t give a drivers license to someone that blind… probably).  So really… there’s no excuse for not finding the house.

After I checked the tracking information, I gave UPS a call to straighten them out.  The customer service rep was very courteous and helpful.  She made a note in their system giving the driver explicit instructions on finding my extremely large house.  She also made a note that the driver should just leave the package on the porch.  She said the delivery would be made on Wednesday.

The delivery was not made on Wednesday, however.  It was not made during the day, it was not made during the evening.  On the way up to bed, I stopped by the mailbox to drop in the Netflix DVD I was sending back.  Apparently, the driver stopped by around 8pm and left one of their little sticky notes on my door informing me that they needed my signature.

Second rant… I gave explicit instructions to just leave the package, that a signature was not necessary.

So instead of going to bed on time, I gave UPS another call.  This time, the customer service representative was neither courteous nor helpful.  He told me that Amazon required the signature.  Since I’d been through this before just last month, I know that Amazon only requires signatures on packages that are valued at over $700 dollars.  My $45 computer book doesn’t even come close.

Third rant… don’t lie to me.

Then the CSR told me I could pick up my package at their inconveniently located facility.  I requested that another delivery attempt be made, since in my mind the first two didn’t really count because of the driver’s inexperience with finding extremely large houses in Albany.  The CSR told me they couldn’t make another delivery because the package was already being returned to Amazon.

Rant four… don’t fucking lie to me!!  It’s either at you facility awaiting pickup or it’s already been sent back to Amazon.  One of those statements is a lie.

I asked to speak to the CSR’s supervisor, because at this point I was really angry.  The supervisor was courteous but completely unhelpful.  She said that someone from the inconveniently located facility would call me by 10am Thursday morning.  At the time, I did not know that she lied to me (see rants three and four).

At 10:10am on Thursday, I called UPS back again (because of course no one called me).  The CSR was courteous, but only moderately helpful.  She said that they would hold the package at the inconveniently located facility for a week, at which point it would be returned to Amazon.  I requested that they attempt the delivered again.  She said she’d have to get the people at the inconveniently located facility to call me back.  I expressed my doubts that such a call would occur, as they had not called me by 10am as promised.  She checked again in her computer system (why not check that first?), and noticed a notation stating that the inconveniently located facility had placed the package on the truck for delivery.  She assured me that the package really would be delivered on Thursday.

The good news is that the package was, indeed, delivered on Thursday.  Attached to the package was a note giving directions to the house and instructions to leave the package without getting a signature.  The less than good news is that the book is pretty battered.  Yo, if I’m spending that much money on a book, I don’t want it to look like I bought it at a used book store.

Oh, and I managed to finish the project without the book, thanks to Google.

Filed by Kelly at 6:57 am under Rant
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Let’s take a break from the Mad Libs, shall we?  I have another rant about maniacs who drive cars.

So, there’s this adorable inverted triangular sign that you often see while out driving.  It’s white with a red border, and in the middle is this interesting word: YIELD.  I wonder if you maniacs know what that means.  No?  Well, I’ll tell you.

It means that you should NOT cut me off when I’m coming down the highway at 55 miles per hour.  It means that you should wait your turn to enter the flow of traffic.  It means… wait for it… YIELD to oncoming traffic.

So will you people just stop trying to hurt me and my fabulous car?  Because if I hit you, it will be your fault, and your insurance company will buy me a new car.

Think about that.

Filed by Kelly at 8:27 pm under Rant
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Mr. Aerten and I love movies.  We have a moderately large collection of movies, and we try to see movies at the theater every week.  So here’s my rant about that…

The nicest theaters in the area are the new one at the Colonie Center Mall.  You’d think they would have created more parking when they remodeled the mall and added the theaters (and two popular restaurants).  But nooooo.  There’s barely enough parking these days.  And now that the Retailers of America have decided that the Christmas Season well before Christmas, there is no parking over there.  What is wrong with you people??!  Christmas shopping season used to start the day after Thanksgiving.  It was a big deal.  These days, Christmas shopping season starts before Halloween.  What’s up with that?

So last Saturday, we went to Colonie to see Quantum of Solace.  Good movie… and I think Daniel Craig is the first Bond that’s believable as a ruthless spy (as opposed to all the others who were just spy-like ladies’ men).  Due to my extreme displeasure at having to actually walk through ::gasp:: a store, however, on Sunday we went to Latham Circle Mall Theaters to see Bolt (cute story, and there were some good laughs).  I’ll be going over to either The Spectrum or Latham for my movies until this holiday shopping nonsense is over.

Bah humbug!

Filed by Kelly at 10:02 am under Rant
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