Shouldn’t that be uPyours?
Wait until they continue to charge you for service even though they know full well you don’t have service and you have spoken to them about this and they agreed to put your account on vacation and credit you until it can be fixed but they don’t, they keep billing you and then send you to collections when you refuse to pay for no phone service and their craptastic incompetant customer service.
I always call it pusgetti, myself, because I like how gross that sounds.
That makes sense - the damn cats are chasing the wasps into the house. Dirty rotten scoundrels.
Today’s work-related rant:
The semi-illiterate people I have to work with, who do this weird pseudo-German thing in their emails where every Noun (and sometimes, Random words that are not Nouns) gets capitalized, which creates a Ton of Extra Work for me, since now I can’t Simply Upload their document, I have to go through the Whole Thing and take a Bunch of extra Time to Edit. There’s often no rhyme or Reason to what gets capitalized and What does not.
WTF, people?
Arrgh, my sympathies. I have a transcriptionist that does this too, and it’s insane-making. I have the authority to tell her not to, but it’s so nonsensical that all I can do is suggest she read up on proper English capitalization.
Dunno what program you’re working in, but IIRC Word has a feature to apply all lowercase, all caps, or sentence-caps to an entire selected block of text. You’d still have to check it to make sure everything went through right, but it would at least save you part of the hassle.
Do it. A transcriptionist should know your company’s capitalization standards as part of their job.
Already done. I’m just saying that’s all I can do other than give her a remedial English lesson through email.
It was entertaining as hell though when she produced a transcript of a hostile phone call and she had things like “I’m talking to you, Bitch” and “I’m gonna get that Mother Fucker.”
IME, most companies will have a style guide that they use, in addition to whatever localized standards they have. Have her manager get her a copy so she can review the section on capitalization. Her manager should also be able to direct her to any company-specific styleguides. Of course, that’s assuming she doesn’t already have access to such things–which, TBQH, given her job, she should. I can tell you that I have my style guide sitting right on my desk, as well as bookmarks for the DBs that contain all the stuff that’s specific to my company.
That’s awesome.
Yeah, our style guide isn’t all that extensive. We only cover what’s necessary for consistency or otherwise deviates from standard English. Nobody should need a style guide for capitalization on common English, anyway, and nobody does; it’s just her being weird.
Whose version of “standard English”? 
Well, not for prose, anyway. Titles are a different matter. (Pretty much the only thing that bugs me about the style we use at my company is that we capitalize any word in a title that’s three letters or longer–including prepositions. Argh. FWIW, that’s half the reason that “From” is capitalized in my name.)
Bah, don’t get cute. There IS a standard for written American English and it does get taught mostly properly in school, even if it gets improperly conflated with spoken English.
No, I’m making the point that there are a couple of standards even for written English. Look at my title capitalization example above. Or consider the Oxford (serial) comma. These are all things that vary between equally “correct” and “official” standards for professional written English, and they’re things that should be consistent across an organization.
I don’t disagree, and I think our style guide is woefully lacking in a lot of areas. But including information on how to capitalize generic words in English is not something any but the most comprehensive guides should need to do, unless it’s something special for that company. It’s like having to tell someone that sentences end with a period, not a dash.
She must have been a Transcriptionist of Very Little Brain!
Right, which is why I specified *whatever general style guide *your company uses for anything it doesn’t make a point about (e.g., here we use The Gregg Reference Manual; at my previous job, we used AP Style). It’s not necessarily as simple as all that, either–the capitalization section in my reference guide spans an entire section (23 pages).
I see what you mean. Here it’s theoretically the Chicago Manual of Style, though we don’t even have a copy in-house. The transcriptionists are independent contractors working from home, so we don’t supply them with copies nor do we expect them to go buy one themselves. When I do need to give a lesson, I refer to freely available internet cites which themselves refer to the CMS.
Blasphemy!
Very nearly deserves its own thread, it does.
Today, I run up to an intersection, and stop, because 1> it’s an all-way stop, and 2> there’s a large truck that’s already pulling into the intersection by the time I got there.
There’s not much of a sidewalk to speak of where I am, so I’m kind of standing in the gutter, but he’s coming from my right so there’s half the width of the street between him and me.
I step forward as he pulls past me, as he’s now mostly through the intersection, with only his ass-end blocking traffic, and by the time I get to mid-street he’d already be well past me and I could proceed unencumbered. Keep in mind there’s still an entire lane between me and the truck.
Except, well, he stops. Completely. With his ass-end hanging in the middle of the intersection, so not only is he blocking ME, he’s blocking auto traffic too. And then he rolls down his window, looks at me, and says “I’m sorry.”
Holy fucking what?! You stop and block traffic just to apologize for stopping and blocking traffic?? Uhh… how about not blocking traffic in the first place?
And in fact, he just sat there staring at me for several seconds. I had to actually say “Would you get out of the way?” before he moved on.
I hate stupid people.
Maybe he was being passive-aggressive about the fact that you started crossing before he was entirely out of the way, which made him nervous? 'Cause as far as I can tell he had the right of way, here.
I wasn’t interfering with his right of way. I was passing behind him. Or would have, had he not stopped in the middle of the effin street. I was still 15ish feet away when he stopped. If he wanted to be an ass with me, whatever, but there was also a line of cars waiting behind him, and none of them were expecting him to stop either.