I agree, religious people are insane.

So, apparently Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot and killed a bunch of people while screaming religious nonsense, is going to claim insanity.

Cute.

I find this especially funny since I personally feel that anyone who believes that an invisible magician in the sky (with a zombie jew for a son, according to Christians) said, "Because I say so", therefore creating the universe, is a little on the nutty side.

That a bunch of people who believe that would call another one who believed something similar insane, just because he did exactly what his holy book told him to do, is...well...insane.

But, hey, I guess I just don't get it.

Dallas Cowboys vs Mass Stupidity (and some cheeseheads)

If you don't like football, don't bother reading this. In light of the recent heinous loss to the 4-4 Green Bay Packers, I'm going to rant about the Cowboys game for a little bit.

First off, any play should be reviewable. Period. Today proved that. Felix Jones had, beyond a shadow of a doubt, recovered a fumble and did not lose the ball until after he was both touched and had done a damn barrel roll on the ground. There was no question that he was down. It was simple oversight on the part of the officials, but it just may well have cost us the game. That, and the "illegal hands to the face" that basically amounted to the guy waving. I've seen the Cowboys lose a lot of games, especially when they're ones they should've won, but the refs cost us this one.

I do have one issue with the Cowboys right now, though. Why the hell is Roy Williams even still in there? What does the dropped ball to yards gained ratio need to be before they give him the boot? And did Patrick Crayton not give ample evidence that he should be starting in every single game since they took him off? For fuck's sake, trade Roy Williams for some offensive line talent while other teams might still think he's worth something.

Speaking of the offensive line...here's a hint to Wade Phillips. You're not going to make three scores in less than a minute. When you have so many injuries that you officially have your last backup offensive lineman on the field, why in the hell would you risk the talent, too? Do you really think that the very last guy that you put in can protect Romo? Especially when he's already been sacked five times? Pull the damn first string when you can't possibly win. How hard is that to understand? I'm seriously starting to doubt Phillips's competence.

Not that he did anything that trumped Green Bay's coach attempting to throw a third challenge flag. Or how about the fact that the officials actually went for it at first? Or how about the fact that, regardless of any of that, the ball had been snapped before they blew the whistle, killing the chance for the challenge that didn't exist? What a mess.

November 16th and writing

I'll be 29. Poor people should be able to skip birthdays, IMO.

If it wasn't for my dad and Janna, it would be a seriously depressing day (money and something). At 29, shouldn't I be buying my own best present? Maybe 30 is the magic number?

Bah.

I've been trying to keep up with what I need to do for Textbroker to pay the bills, but it just isn't happening. My mind runs dry. It's just hard to write 400 words for $6 all day, even though it's really fairly good pay. Hopefully I'll come around and be interested enough to do it again. Or my SEOing will take off.

I neglected it (on purpose) for about three months so that the domains would age, which is an important part of ranking in the search engines, and when I came back I succeeded in making my rankings DROP by cleaning up my home page. WTF.

Oh, almost lost the dog, or so we thought. She suddenly became unable to control her bladder. Seems to have been an infection, though, as with some antibiotics she's actually better. Only another $150 or so borrowed. Woot. If it keeps her around for another year or so (optimism+old dog+cancer=stupid, I know), it's worth it. I sort of blame myself. I've been home far more than anyone else (except maybe Jeanne)...I should be taking the old dog out more. I will now!

High school football scores! OMG Swine Flu! Where to buy snow globes in Austin! (oh, also it's flooding)

Seriously, that's what the news looks like this morning. The first major rain we've had in months, in the middle of a record breaking drought, major routes shut down all over the place including Interstate 35, rivers eating small villages, and one of the headlines on the various news sources is about snow globes. I was really thinking it had somehow rained all day yesterday, all night last night, and still raining right now without any flooding at all. Nope. After digging REALLY deep I found small articles about the governor deploying various vehicles...the national guard...some areas saw over 10 inches of rain...more than we've had in about a year...

But nothing so serious as to knock high school football and snow globes off the front page...

The Beginning of The Allstate Saga

Crap. One of the family wrecked her car. Not bad, no injuries, but she was at fault, and now it's time to deal with the insurance company and getting a car with less than 10,000 miles on it fixed that has front end damage. On top of that, the car is in Beaumont, about 250 miles east of home. They're already refusing to deal with the driver, wanting to talk to the policy holder (me), which is rather stupid in my opinion since, hey, the car's damaged, it's their job to fix it! Why does it matter who they talk to? My name isn't even on the car itself, the loan for the car, nothing, yet because I'm the "policy holder", they just have to talk to me. Joy. Well, I've always heard good things about Allstate, so I guess it's time they proved it. Am I in good hands? AM I!?!?

SPEELING DUSNT MATTUR ON TEH INTERWEBS!!!!!!11

Yes, it does. You know why? Because that's all you have.

I pick on people online occasionally about poor spelling. Not anything horrible. This is an example from World of Warcraft. It went something like this, anyway.

Moron: I CANT WAIT FOR TEH NEW EXPATION

Me: What's an expation?

Moron: ZOMG UR GAY U NO I MENT EXPANSION STFU AND STOP BEIN GAY I DON HAV TO HAV GUD SPEELING TO BE SMRT

Yeah, online, you sort of do. I'm not saying typos equal idiot, but when the only impression someone is going to have of you is your text...what you type...shouldn't you put at least a tiny bit of effort into not looking like you don't know your own language?

And whatever happened to people being at least a bit embarrassed when they made a mistake instead of exploding in tardrage? Maybe it's my imagination, but once upon a time, didn't people generally say something like, "Oh, hah, I don't know what an expation is...I meant expansion."

I guess it's become socially unacceptable to be wrong about anything, ever, period. While this is scary as hell, it does explain a few things. Creationism much?

72 year old beggar

Guy on the street corner was holding a sign (typical drawn on cardboard affair) that said "72 year old down on his luck. Never give up hope. Have faith."

Wow. After 72 years, he still hasn't figured out that faith is silly and that he actually needs to, you know, DO something? Just...wow. Some say religion is a crutch, but what does it become when you've already fallen, besides idiocy?

A decent day ruined by an hour of idiocy

How is it that the entire call center could have a decent day all the way up until 9pm and then suddenly enter The Fucktard Zone? This isn't anything that could be reliably predicted, mind you. It happens all the time, but there's no particular day or time. There doesn't seem to be any way to know when this is going to happen but, suddenly, starting at 9pm, I got five calls in a row about computer issues that had nothing to do with their ISP (me). Five people of well below average intelligence IN A ROW.

Then, the kicker, was a woman who had just gotten two cable boxes and neither were working. She had a third that was working, and even the first two outlets worked just fine plugged straight to the TV. First available appointment was 4 days out.

Now, first of all, when a phone rep says FIRST AVAILABLE, they don't mean "first available unless you pitch a fit like a three year old." They mean first available. If they could give you something earlier to get you off the phone, they would. That you decide to show just how immature and retarded you can be does not, in any way, help anyone.

By the way, for anyone out there that hasn't figured it out yet, an over the phone customer service rep's priorities are, in this order:

1.) Make the biggest paycheck possible with the least amount of work and
2.) Get each customer off the phone as quickly as possible without breaking any rules that would endanger the paycheck

You start out wanting to be helpful and wanting to make things better, but people in general will knock that urge right out of you within a few months.

So anyway, this woman was going on and on about how she wanted me to "send a signal" and "program the box" etc etc (people often make things up when they have no idea what they're talking about) when the box wasn't even booting. We went round and round with me telling her, over and over again, "If the cord coming from the wall is plugged in to the cable in, and the box has been plugged in for 20 minutes with no response, then there's nothing I can do. A tech has to come out, and you have the first available appointment."

How hard is that to understand?

It doesn't matter if you say "So I just got this box and now I have to wait?" It doesn't matter if you tell me how much money you pay for the service every month. It doesn't matter how long you've been a customer. None of that matters. It's as pertinent as telling me your curtains are blue, or stamping your feet and screaming, "But I don't want the sun to be hot!"

That's the way it is and nothing you can say will change it. Saying the same thing repeatedly will certainly not help.

Anyway, for maybe the 5th or 6th time in the year and a half I've been there, I had to hang up on her. The conversation was over for a good ten minutes before I did it, but that certainly didn't keep her from talking.

Well, the original point of this was to marvel at the fact that dumb people always manage to move in droves. The argumentative twits all call the call center at the same time. The non-tipping jerks always called the pizza places at the same time. How does that work? There has to be some sort of science to it.

So if anyone out there argues with tech support or stiffs the pizza guy, let me know if there's some sort of moronic collective out there or something. That way I can find it and destroy it.

Open ended questions

I think a lot of people aren't aware that open ended questions can be extremely rude, especially under certain circumstances. By asking an open ended question, you're assuming that the answerer has the time and inclination, not to mention information, to give you a decent answer. If you're interviewing someone, that's fine, it's expected.

If you call tech support and ask open ended questions, you'd better know what you're talking about, otherwise you're going to make a huge jerk of yourself. Not that many people seem to care anymore.

Example: Customer calls in and says his PS3 can't connect to the web, gives a DNS error. I immediately inform him that this is a known issue with the PS3, Sony has a fix, and to call them up. First off, had he checked his computer, he would've known it was working fine and there was no point in calling his ISP in the first place, so he's already under the table in dumb-points.

But then he has the gall to ask, "Well, what do I do if Sony can't fix it?"

I've already told him it's not my problem. I've already told him who to call. I've even go so far as to tell him, under no uncertain terms, that they have a fix. It couldn't be any clearer that I have nothing left to say on the matter, so an open ended question at this point is about as rude as you can get. He could've cussed at me and hung up and I would've been far less irritated.

Another good one. After troubleshooting a cable box, and the customer being very, very confused through the entire process, we get to the end of the line of what we can do over the phone and set up a trouble call.

And she asks, "What could cause this?"

For one thing, you couldn't figure out how to unplug your box, what makes you think you're going to understand what caused the problem? If you think you did something to cause it, how about you tell me? Why do you even think I know what caused it? I'm not out there fixing it. I'm on the phones, talking to you, and scheduling someone else to come fix it. I'd say that's pretty good odds that I have no clue, nor do I particularly care. I'm already passing it on to someone else; obviously I'm done here.

Even more irritating, sometimes, is open ended silence, or asking someone to hang on while you do something that has nothing to do with them.

Customer: I can't connect to my wireless router.

Me: Okay, it looks like you don't have wireless through us, so there's really nothing I can do with that. I would suggest you call the router manufacturer.

Customer: (silence)

Me: Is there anything else I can do for you?

Customer: Come on, you can't just help me out?

Me: No, it's not our equipment, therefore I can't do anything with it. Is there anything else *company* related that I can help you with?

Customer: (silence)

You can see that this is going nowhere, yet they persist. They're like little robots that don't know how to go around an obstacle so therefore they just ram it over and over again until they run out of battery power. Only the robot is funny.

Discrimination

I really hate the way humans work.

It's discrimination to not hire someone because of color, regardless of demographics showing what race is better at what job. Yet it's not discrimination to leave someone without a car to get to work because they had a repo three years ago.

It's discrimination if you hire a guy instead of a girl for a physical job because women are biologically, physically less strong than men. Yet it's not discrimination to not give someone a place to live because they had a home foreclosed on.

It's discrimination to hire someone to a job because they're younger, but it's not discrimination for an insurance company to charge you more because you're younger.

See the common theme here?

It's discrimination if the company might be out money at some point, but if the consumer might be out money, or a car, or a fucking home, that's okay. Nobody really fucking cares, do they?

Yeah, this is going to be a fun day to do tech support.

So irritated and depressed...

I had gotten my head all ready to go back to the hellhole I call (or called) work. I've been waiting for HR to get a part time schedule for me, as per my psychiatrist, to see how I handle the stress. The person in HR basically told me she'd get back to me and has ignored me for the past week, emails and voicemails. I already have no idea how I'm going to pay bills since this 30 days that I could barely afford is rapidly turning into 60 days.

And now, not only are they expecting us to hard sell (offer, then attempt to overcome objections when they say no) customers calling in with tech support issues, regardless of if we're able to get it fixed, but apparently now it's considered a sellable call even if the customer's equipment is the issue (as in, they don't know how to turn on their TV or their PC is dead, which, sadly, happens VERY often). On top of that, we're supposed to inform them if they have a late balance as well, AND a new set of notes saying we verified their security info...all under the same metrics that no one was meeting before.

How much stress and confrontation can they stack on to one person before it's considered abuse?

Going back to delivering pizza is sounding better and better...I simply don't have the will to learn a new job right now.

It's hard trying to see the good in a situation that was ridiculous a year ago... sales and tech support will never go together, and just because they get a trickle of income out of it, somebody seems to think it's worth making the turnover rate far worse than it used to be due to sheer stress.

I have to believe that I'm not the only IT minded person in the world that has a problem being confrontational 60-70 times a day, rapid fire, with no break in between except for two 15's and an hour lunch. I'm talking, one customer hangs up, the next one is immediately on the phone. You go from one confrontation to another to another...

Maybe sales people can do it, but hell, even car salesmen don't deal with that many people a day.