Tag: complaint

Time to give Al Gore a hard time again

Boing Boing: Al Gore’s impressively messy office

It won’t be the first time, nor the last, that I’ll complain about Al Gore.  I’m still angry that he and his advisors weren’t able to win a very, very winnable election against an opponent who has done very, very terrible things to our country.

I am not impressed with Al Gore’s messy office.  Yes, I know that they say really smart people are often messy.  I don’t care.  I’m not here to debate his IQ.  I am here to debate his dedication to his cause.  Does the man who is becoming synonymous with saving the environment really need three monitors and a television running?  Does he really need hard copies of all those books and papers?  And why not a reusable dry-erase board?

This is why you lost, Al.  On the rare occasions when you have a message, you can’t stick with it.

I’m not really sure why Al Gore pisses me off so much.  Maybe I just need a nap.

A complaint about me

Yeah, I know, if I complain too much about me, it will create a self-referential vortex and suck everything in the Universe into a black hole of complainingness.  But I had to share this.

I’ve probably complained about my computer before.  A quick search turns up nothing, but I must have mentioned the utter hatred I have for my Dell laptop.  I had a Dell desktop in college that was great.  I used it for years.  Then I bought an Inspiron 9100 that has been nothing but trouble.  The fan runs all the time.  The power supply is almost as big as my cat.  The DVD-RW broke.  It’s slow and clunky and just generally irritating.

This morning, I took off some panels on the bottom, looking for the memory sticks.  I wanted to see if I could buy a cheap stick of 512 MB and speed the stupid thing up, or if I’d have to replace the 256 MB sticks in there already.  Sure enough, the computer has two slots and two 256s.  Not surprising.

But the first panel I pulled off housed a fan.  It looked dusty, so I pulled it out to clean it off.  Imagine my surprise (Although, truthfully, I shouldn’t have been surprised, and this is why the complaint is about me) when the vent between the fan and the outside world was completely clogged with dust.  I don’t mean it was a little dirty.  I mean it was blocked.  If that vent was the only source of air in the room you were in, you’d die.

The fan on the other side of the computer was in the same condition.  I cleaned out the dust, restarted the computer, and voila!  It’s quiet again.  And it runs faster.  Not as fast as I’d like, but nearly as fast as a P4 3.2 gig processor with 512 MB of RAM can be expected to run.

So, now I feel a bit dumb.  Here I’ve been complaining about how crappy my computer is, and all it really needed for a significant performance boost was a quick cleaning.

I’m sorry, Dell.  You probably only deserve 40-60% of the hatred I throw your way.  If the computer continues to perform adequately, I might even take you off the Never Buy List.

Just stop drinking the water

Does your office have a water dispenser that takes one of those giant jugs of water?  The kind where you have to take the top off the jug, lift it up, and flip it over to refill the dispenser?  Our office does.  I’ve been here not quite two months and I’ve refilled the dispenser about five times.  I know I’m not drinking that much water.  Plainly people are choosing to not get water rather than refill it.

I understand it’s tough to refill.  But I can do it, and therefore most of the rest of the office should be able to do it, also.

Honestly, a better solution would be what we had at my old office, which is a filter for tap water.  That would solve this problem, and be better for the environment.

But, since that isn’t going to happen, it would be really cool if the other people in the office would just do their share of the refilling.

Youre a pain, Cingular

I’ve been having some problems at work.  It’s a really long story that I won’t go into because it’s not that interesting, but the end result is that I need wireless internet access for my work computer.  I did some brief research, and decided that online reviews suggest that Sprint has the best internet service.  Corporate tech support vetoed Sprint.  “We would prefer not to use Sprint”, they said.  Whatever.  Verizon was pretty expensive, and they have this really cool reputation for selling “unlimited” access and then cutting off service for people who use too much bandwidth.  Plus they’re trying to kill Vonage over some ridiculous patents (Search Techdirt if you want more info), which makes me salty.

Anyway, we went with Cingular.  The only other option was TMobile, and everything I’ve ever heard about them suggests that they are the Hyundai of mobile phone providers.

The Cingular card has been basically unusable.  I tried to download a large text file today and the connection cut out.  I tried to remote login to our server back at the main office to tweak some settings and the connection cut out.  I can’t talk to my wife on GTalk because it keeps signing me in and out.

To top it off, I need the wireless number attached to the card to even be allowed to speak to tech support.  I don’t have that because I didn’t buy the card, work did.  And work tech support took the day off today or something, so I couldn’t get the number I need.

In any event, I have my work laptop at home, and I’m seriously considering doing some work from here, where I have a reasonable internet connection.  But we’re going to have to figure this out, because I can’t work from home all the time (Not that I would mind).

So, Cingular, your tech support will get its chance to try and help me, but if you tell me to reinstall the connection software, I will seriously come to your house and do something really awful, like use your restroom and leave the toilet seat up.

Featured Complaint of the Week

Complaint: Dumbass Major League Baseball

There is no reason to freaking block a game because it’s on ESPN. IDIOTS!

So, one of my more obnoxious friends has been badgering me to upgrade the Your Complaints section of Complaint Hub for a while.  I haven’t done it because I’m lazy.  He wants to be able to reply to complaints.  I’ve told him to go to Ventbox, but he ignores me.

One of these days I’ll get around to it.  Probably not this week.  But one of these days.

I realized something today

This may be obvious, but it just occured to me this afternoon.  The wife and I were dropping her car off at my grandmother’s to avoid the wrath of DC parking officials who don’t like people who “forget” to register their car in the District when they move there.  We’re selling the car, so it doesn’t make sense to title it in DC.  Anyway, we stayed to chat, and the topic of talking on the phone with computers came up.  The phone had rung, and I answered it.  It was someone wanting me to take a survey.  I declined, since it would be rude to leave my wife and grandmother.

In any event, we talked a bit about talking on the phone with computers, and how voice recognition has come a long way, but that it’s often difficult to get a real person on the phone when you need one.

I realized why this irritates me so much.  First, it irritates me because, in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a mild annoyance, which means it’s more likely to get under my skin.  But the real reason it drives me up the wall is that anything a computer voice can do on the phone, I’ve probably already tried to do on the company’s website.  I don’t call my bank to check my balance or see the last three debits from my account.  I call because I have a weird question that a computer isn’t going to understand.

There should be special customer service lines for the technologically-adept.  I’m willing to promise (And actually mean it) that I’ve made every reasonable effort to solve my problem on your website before calling you.  In return, you promise to actually have a real person answer the phone when I call.  I’m willing to answer two questions to a computer for call routing purposes, but that’s all.  No series of menus that never seem to quite have the option I need.

I suspect that things will go this way.  As more and more people grow up with the internet, more and more people will turn to the computer before the phone.  And as websites get better, the number of people who need to actually call a company for customer service will go down.  Then it may make sense to have direct lines answered by people because the only problems that will actually be addressed by phone are the ones that really do require human intelligence.

Of course, that’ll probably happen right about the same time that we figure out real artificial intelligence, and that will change all of customer service.  But that could be cool, too.

Fewer lights, more pincers

Empire State Building Seeks Best of the Brightest via Gizmodo

With the new lights, though, the Empire State would be able to feature “dynamic new patterns,” said James T. Connors, the general manager of the Empire State Building Company.

Just what NYC needs.  A huge, gaudy, brightly colored display.  When this sort of thing is confined to Times Square, it’s kind of cool.  I still remember the first time I walked out of the subway into Times Square, and the overwhelming-ness of it all.  To be fair, it was only a few years ago.  But still.

And I’m not a New Yorker.  I love to visit the city, but I don’t live there.  But I can’t imagine that any New Yorker really wants a huge, animated American Flag waving over the city.

Maybe they’d be better off if they got their own Anti-Terrorist Pincers of Doom like we did.  Rumor has it that over 30,000 terrorists have already been captured and impaled by the pincers.  How many terrorists has the Empire State Building caught?  That’s what I thought.

Some of those loans were NOT a good idea

Subprime lending is imploding

By now you’ve all heard about the problems in the subprime mortgage market. To summarize, if a person with bad credit and no money down wants a house, giving them a loan can make a ton of money for anyone willing to charge them exorbitant interest rates. With the housing market the way it was recently, it didn’t matter that they were unqualified because their homes would drastically increase in value almost immediately. Then, when they realized that they really couldn’t afford the place, they had no trouble selling it.

Now that the housing market sucks in comparison, these people who never should have been approved in the first place are defaulting on their loans, many of them in the first few months. When this happens, secondary mortgage purchasers (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) force the lender to buy back the loan. This means that lenders who made too many of these loans are bankrupt. And, since we’ve recently seen that neither Fannie nor Freddie are particularly concerned with things like obeying accounting laws, it follows that they are similarly unconcerned about ethical lending practices.  Now, the whole country is in a bit of a mess because of these defaulting loans.

These loans never should have been made. Many times a lender will take a loan that was designed for an investor and give it to an unqualified borrower. These investor loans usually offer very low payments up front, but then after two or five years, they explode into much larger payments. For someone buying a house to renovate and resell it, these make sense. For someone buying more house than he/she can really afford, they are utterly irresponsible.

No RSS = WTF?

ShirtADay via HIDE YOUR ARMS

Okay, this is a cool idea. A new t-shirt every day, and the more people who buy it, the cheaper it gets.

But they don’t have an RSS feed for the shirts. This is the type of site that RSS was made for. If I wasn’t on my way to bed, I would email them right now and demand an RSS feed.

I mean, the nerve. Making me actually, like, check back every day to see what’s new. I don’t have time for that. Do you think these complaints write themselves?

We really need a solution for the immigration problem

Secret Immigration Raids in the D.C. Subway – NAM

I may be a little unsure of what I think should be done about the immigration problems in this country, but picking out Latinos on the Metro and asking for “papers” is not the answer.  It’s hard to fathom who might have thought that was a good idea.

I understand that many immigrants are coming in illegally, and many aren’t paying taxes, but still benefit from American tax dollars.  And I understand that I’m not one of the citizens being noticeably hurt by the fact that they’re here.  But whatever solution we come up with has to start with the fact that these are human beings, and this is the United States.  This is not a country where people of any color should have to worry about being stopped and asked for papers.

We need a solution.  We need to stop politicizing this, like we do everything else, and figure out what is best for the country, and what is best for people looking for better lives.  And then we have to implement that solution.