Internet (both wi fi and smartphone) went down last night. Restarting router did not work. Eventually I called Verizon and they fixed it remotely by resetting something from their end…
Today there’s a follow-up e-mail from Verizon telling me an even faster way to get help next time this happens: use their website!
Reminds me of a label I saw when I was just a kid back in the 70’s. There was a box with hand holes in the end. Printed just below the holes was “Holes for observation of contents only.” My thought at the time was something along the line of “WTF!? Those are obviously for carrying the box.”
Older, more cynical, me now recognizes that as a CYA warning.
What a douchey, not to mention red-flaggy question.
A good response would’ve been “What did you do?”
Confrontational, sure, but sounds like there’s a hint of skeeve with that garage.
And here’s a frustration - we’ve used this garage for almost 40 years. My dad was their main parts guy from the day they opened until he retired. After dad died, they were good for quite a while, but this whole situation has made me so upset. I’m sure he meant it as “haha” joking. Only, I was not laughing.
Rant: “new” battery in vintage iPhone went bad after a month. But that was only one of five things wrong with the bent, cracked piece of crap (screen, dock, camera, SIM…). But was limping along with unreliable phone, because wife was sure we’d be in the poorhouse if I paid for a new phone.
Anti-rant: Tried an old trick from back when I bought my first iPod Mini… went through Craigslist ads from November and December, and emailed them asking if they still had their phone. Got a reply in ten minutes: “Still got it. Brand new in box, $250. Can meet in half an hour.”
Woo-hoo! I’ve used the phone all day, and still have battery. I plug it in, it charges! The camera works every time, and never says “No SIM detected”. And no broken glass snagging my finger…
More than likely she was pissed you didn’t take the hint and drive her to the bus stop.
ETA: Note that I’m not agreeing with her, because that’s some entitled shit right there.
Yeah, that occurred to me after, and I definitely would not have been allowed to do that due to liability issues. Considering we offer all kinds of transportation help up to and including cab fare, and she could have received a bus schedule and map if she asked for one, and she left five minutes before she needed to be there, I figured it wasn’t that big of a priority for her.
I don’t work directly in the shelter, just admin. I honestly think one of the hardest parts of working in the shelter for direct service staff must be constantly reminding themselves that our clients are victims under a lot of stress. They can really be very rude.
Well, they were all happy except for the kid with the latex allergy… 
Here’s a hearty fuck you to the guy on the phone today who just had to crap on my already kind of crappy day (due to sickness). This is someone I have a business relationship only and don’t know well at all.
Me: Hi. Pardon my cough, I’ve been sick for a few days.
Him: You need to get over to the drug store and buy yourself some blah, blah, blah
Me: Thanks, but I’ve got some stuff I’m taking and it’s working OK. I just hope to get through this in a few days. It’s been pretty bad.
Him: Oh, no, you’re going to have this for at least another week!
Well, fuck you. You have no idea what the fuck I have or how fucking long it’s going to last. I’m not really interesting in your fucking over-the-phone diagnosis. But thanks for making me feel worse than I already do!!
Feel better, John. On your own time schedule!
Okay, this is petty and nit-picky, but that’s why we’re here, right?
Amazon reviews that are one or teo words. WTF?
“Great book”
“Loved it”
“Hated it”
“Insightful!”
“Excellent!”
“Huh?”
“Terrible writer”
Those are not helpful and I rate them as such.
OTOH God bless the people who take the time to write long, well-informed, articulate, HELPFUL reviews of books and products. There is a special place in heaven and in my heart for them.
I worked a ball game tonight. WTF? Who gives a 6 year old a $20 bill and sends them to the concession stand. So all his friends can clog up the line begging him to buy them something. I had to send him back to his Mother with a note, telling her this problem he was having. She marched down there and griped me out because she was missing half the game. When she ordered we put her on the slow track, she had to wait longer. That is just how we roll. People, hear this; we are volunteers, we don’t owe you anything, we are not MickeyDs, we are here to help the band program, and, NO you ain’t getting nothing free!!
My friend self-pubbed a novel and his biggest complaint is that people review the book without providing specific feedback. Even for a negative review it’s important to be specific. And it can also be helpful to say, “this book would be good for people who like…” even if you hate it.
Update: Aunt J. died. Yesterday morning. My mom called me, having heard from their brother. “Well, she’s in hell now,” says my mom. Seriously? This is a rivalry going back to 1940, if not earlier, so no use calling her on it. Still, IMO there’s fault on both sides.
And given that a lot of self-published books are reviewed by friends and family as opposed to actual reading public…and that your rating Amazon rests on how many five-star reviews your work has…and those five-star reviews will no doubt be from the one-word-review friends and family…
This was a huge issue in the group I was speaking about in another thread, Spice. The more five-star reviews your self-published work received, the more the group dismissed you as a self-congratulatory ask-everyone-for-reviews hog. It was interesting when these people moved to Facebook, made separate author pages to separate the book(s) from their own accounts, and Facebook promptly shut them down because they weren’t legitimate enough. It also recently happened to a friend of mine who was never part of the group. Facebook shut down her author page because they claimed she created it to garner more reviews.
Wow. This group sounds kind of toxic. I know I’m lucky to have mine. We’re like a family that can be brutally honest with one another. One thing I love about it, it’s never about ego. Nobody positions themselves as superior. We’re just there because we love to write and we want to improve.
I intend to give a review for my buddy’s self-pub. I plan to give it 3.5 stars with a breakdown of what worked and what didn’t. For me, for a writer, honesty is love. I know he would do the same for me.
The toxicity was another reason why many people left. The ones who remained are the “love to write/want to improve” types. As a group they don’t like to socialize very much. The majority of the group, at least back in the glory days, was as much for socialization and the ensuing drama as it was for the actual writing. Because of that, it was, in some ways, a more lively group.
I wish my group had had more people like you. Looking back, I think a lot of those people in my group who’d jumped on the self-pub bandwagon were very much attracted to the shiny of it. It’s not surprising that most of them haven’t self-pub’d anything – or have even written anything else – since.
My 90-year-old father is in a nursing home that used to be a good place but has been going downhill since a change in administration.
Last week dad’s roommate died. Later that same day, the staff moved in a new roommate, complete with extensive isolation paraphernalia because the new guy has a C diff infection. Not only did the staff pair an infected person in a small room with a non-infected person, but both persons ate their meals in the communal dining room.
The situation was discovered by my sister the next day, and she raised a bit of hell. Still, it took the staff several days to relocate the infected roommate.
Kiz:
We do socialize a lot. Most holidays we have some kind of party, we do BBQs and we always have dinner before our biweekly meetings. Then there’s the constant chatter on Hangouts. But we are a very no bullshit crowd. We’ve been together for a little over two years and I’ve yet to see any drama. These people really have become my best friends. It’s a small miracle we found each other.
The only potential drawback is that in an effort to preserve what we have, we’ve been really picky about who joins. It’s a juried process (supermajority vote) so it can be intimidating for people who want to get involved. But there are 8 of us, I’m not sure we’re in need of more members. We made it juried because we had too many people dropping in and not taking it seriously. One guy even fell asleep on us!
If you’re ever looking for honest feedback, feel free to shoot an email my way. The give and take of critique and development of trust between writers is one of my favorite things about the process.
I had a very intense, vivid dream last night about a former extremely close friend. We fell out, badly and irreparably, in 2005. I ended up wide awake at 2AM, near tears and heartbroken as if the falling out happened yesterday. Now I’m just agitated, sad, and tired.
If that wasn’t out-of-the-blue enough, I got a notification that someone had viewed my LinkedIn profile. I dutifully checked to see if it was some super awesome recruiter that wanted to pay me $100,000 a year to do little to nothing… no such luck. It was a former fiance, who cheated on me and dumped me in a movie theater while we were watching Twister back in 1996. I have absolutely no clue how he tracked me down… I’ve changed first names since then, have no mutual contacts with him, and we are in extremely different fields. He didn’t message me, thank god- just viewed my profile like a creepy stalker.
What the hell, blasts from the painful pasts??