June 27, 2007 Adjudication Services P.O. Box 37135 Washington, DC 20013 To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to contest a parking ticket, citation #[redacted], that I received yesterday, June 26th, 2007. I recently moved to the north side of the 1400 block of [redacted] St. NW, and registered my car. I was told that, since my street is not zoned residential, I would not receive a Residential Parking Permit. I usually park on the north side of my street. However, on Tuesdays, the north side is closed for street cleaning, and so I moved my car to the south side of the street. Yesterday, I received a ticket for failure to display an RPP. According to the DDOT website, the 1400 block of [redacted] St. NW is not zoned residential. I have enclosed a printout of the DDOT web page listing the blocks of [redacted] St. NW which are zoned residential, and the 1400 block is not listed. I understand that the residential parking zones are designed to prevent commuters from leaving cars parked in residential areas all day, and I applaud these efforts. But in this case, my car was parked perhaps fifteen feet from the front door of my home. Clearly this is not the behavior that the parking zones were designed to prevent. Therefore, I would greatly appreciate it if you would forgive this parking ticket. Additionally, steps should be taken so that I and my fellow residents are not subject to similar tickets in the future.

You may reach me during the day at my work phone number, [redacted], or at home in the evening at [redacted]. Thank you very much for your attention.

Sincerely, Senor Complain-o

Have something you want to get off your chest?  Realize that my complaint submission page is a long way from being cool?  Your prayers have been answered.  VentBox is now live, and you can go sign up and start complaining about whatever you want.

I recently purchased a carton of Safeway brand organic milk from the Safeway near my house. After drinking the milk, I rinsed the carton, and then asked my wife whether it could be recycled with the bottles and cans, or if we had to take it with the cardboard. She didn’t know. So I checked the carton.

To my utter shock and dismay, I found no indication that the carton was recyclable at all! This is organic milk, friendly to cows, friendly to the environment, but the carton has to go in the trash? I hoped that I was just missing the mark on the carton that explained how to recycle it.

I went to Safeway online and filled out their contact form.

I purchased a carton of your Safeway brand organic milk, and the carton does not seem to be recycleable. Is this true? While I applaud Safeway’s efforts to provide a greater selection of certified organic foods, I would hope that you would also provide more environmentally friendly packaging.

I’m not allowed to print their response because it might contain Safeway proprietary information. I’m not sure if their little disclaimer would stand up in court, but I don’t really want to get an email from their lawyer. But I can summarize.

Thank you for your email. Sorry it took so long to respond. Thanks for telling us that you can’t recycle the organic milk carton. Your comments are important to us. We’re glad you’re buying our organic products, even though the “O” symbol we use reminds people of Oprah. We’re going to have more organic products in the future, and we hope Oprah isn’t just waiting for us to get further along before she sues us. We’ll file your comments away somewhere, and probably no one will ever read them, even though we told you that they would. Thanks for contributing to the bottom line – some executive just got a million dollar bonus for heading up the organic initiative.

Safeway may or may not have said all those things. I’m not sure. Maybe they should have let me reprint it verbatim to make sure I haven’t misquoted them.

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Blogwise – Blog directory I just registered Complaint Hub with Blogwise, although it will take some time for a real person to verify it.  Perfect timing, I say, because I’m in a bit of a posting slump right now.  But I won’t be forever.  Maybe a flood of readers from Blogwise will arrive at the same time I break out of my slump with a half-dozen brilliant posts, sure to turn the casual blog browser into a lifelong fan. Or maybe not.

Old Stuff

First, Complaint Hub was a blog. As you may know, everyone was put here on earth for a purpose. After years of soul searching and contemplation, I have come to the realization that my purpose here is to complain. Do what you know, they say. And so I am.

Complaining is something I know. Complaining is something I’m good at. It may not always be appreciated, but true greatness never is in its time. History will vindicate me.

Then, it was a place where you could share your complaints, too.

And then it was two blogs, with the addition of From Harvard Street, a blog about my life as a new resident of Washington, DC. More recently, I decided that it was too much trouble to maintain two blogs. From Harvard Street was a nice experiment in using a different blogging engine, but WordPress is a much more mature application, and I really don’t want to have to worry about two sites anymore.

Then, it wasn’t a place where you could share complaints anymore because my webhost decided to upgrade their version of Ruby on Rails (Otherwise I’m very happy with them, and this is a complaint more about what the Rails people did in their update than a complaint about Dreamhost), and everything broke. Unfortunately for anyone wanting to complain here, this is not anywhere near the top of my ToDo list, so it’s probably not getting fixed any time soon.

And now, I’ve switched from WordPress to Drupal. I’m really happy with Drupal so far, and the site got a needed redesign (Although my mother-in-law doesn’t like it). More changes are coming, including a return of Your Complaints.

As for me, I’m a software engineer doing soul-sucking government contracting work. I’m on a new job since April 2008, and while the work is still dumb, at least my boss is cool. In my spare time, I like photography, writing, traveling, and hanging out with my wife. I have a really loud and needy cat named Biscuit, who is barely tolerated in public but secretly loved by my wife.

And in September, I will be a new dad. I will probably forget to update this page when the kid pops out, but you can keep up with the latest and greatest on my dad-hood via the front page. You can contact me at complaint hub at gmail.

Current

Whoa, this hasn’t been updated in a while. I have a different job. I have two kids. That one I was just talking about in the paragraph above? She’s in kindergarten. I started another blog that turned into a small business that failed and now the LLC that used to be the business owns a gorgeous home in Annapolis. Life is weird sometimes.

Now I work with government accountants. I ride my bike a lot. I love my wife and kids and the rest of my family, who I see more lately than I used to, which is good. This blog is likely to have a lot of stuff about bikes, living in DC, stupid intellectual property law (especially pertaining to ebooks), and complaining. You’ve been warned.