5 posts tagged “rant”

You know what's annoying. Those sites where moving the mouse pointer over a hyperlink displays a huge, page-obscuring pop-up balloon (with a convenient advertisement within). So, yes I found and turned off the new Snap Preview feature. This guy wrote a good essay as to why Snap Previews suck, but for here the fact that it annoyed me is enough to kill it.

File under "Things that will turn me into a misanthrope".

I shouldn't expect much from cheap watches given out for magazine subscription renewals, but I had hoped the US News gift watch would last more than four months before the metal strap broke to pieces or the pin to set the time to pop out of the thing. Well, the watch is garbage so it's time to buy a new one. So I went to the mall, plunked $10 for some cheap thing and be on my way.

As I approach the bus stop, I notice a lady sitting there doing nothing, who was wearing a watch. Needing to set the time on my new watch, I simply ask her does she have the time. So of course she says "No she doesn't". I am sitting to her right, and can see her watch in operation. Had I wore my glasses that day, I would have just looked myself and synchronized watches.

Whatever happened to courtesy?

• The voice activated prompt system requiring almost inhumanly perfect enunciation from the speaker. I don't like repeating "Can. Not. Connect. To. Internet." half a dozen times.
• The voice activated troubleshooter. Of course it assures me that there is no outage before taking me through twenty minutes of spare time I apparently had instructing me to disconnect the power cord from the modem, disconnect the coaxial cable from the modem, and turn off the computer (thankfully not asking to disconnect the power cord from that as well).  Of course, when it finally surrendered and sent me to a human technician, the very first words out of his mouth are "There's an outage in your area"!
• The Cox real-time status website http://status.cox.net . There's no outage according to that page, either.
• All the while that I was on hold waiting, Cox reminding me every so often that there is a wealth of self help at their website. Notwithstanding the accuracy of the site (see previous bullet), a shovel is useless if it is buried. Online self-help is of no help if I can't get online to access it.
• That I was this close to buying a Macintosh notebook and that it has no phone modem port. Apple has too optimistic an opinion of the quality of my high-speed internet service. This is not the first time this month I had to acquaint myself with the Cox Communications voice-activated placebo troubleshooter.
• That Verizon FIOS still is not available in my neighborhood.
  

So, if somebody can sign for a package addressed to someone with a Scots-Irish surname with a Iberian-Romance surname, then exactly what is the point of even asking for signatures for packages? For that matter, I've been sitting within the address to which the package in question was addressed to, and yet I recall no delivery personnel of FedEx arriving here to deliver aforementioned package, not even at 8:09pm, which is the time FedEx claims that the package was delivered. Of course, had it been delivered to my address, the signers surname would have properly matched the surname to which the package was address to.

One consolation is that this was a trial-run. Federal Express was only delivering a $100 warranty. The $1200 computer to which the warranty was for doesn't ship until next week. Please get this right next time!

Now I need to track down who has what is essentially a worthless (to them) stack of papers. And figure out how in fact FedEx misdelivered my package, and allowed it to be signed for by someone with a completely dissimilar last name!