Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Stuff I don’t get (22 of 31/57 of 274)

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I went to IKEA this morning for the express purpose of buying a single one-day-only sale item. It was sold out by the time I got there, but that wasn’t the problem. Sellouts happen, and I could have tried to get there earlier. The problem is that the item was advertised as one per household, and there were clearly more than a few people who were getting around that. I don’t want to hear about how they were all honest people and I am wrong to assume that they did not in fact live in separate households. When you see what appears to be a husband and wife with FIVE of the damn things, and no other people getting into their vehicle along with the merchandise… exactly how would you guess I am making a wrong assumption? I’m really interested to hear the interesting fiction that might spawn.

But enough about that minor annoyance and on to my real topic. I don’t get the whole appeal of IKEA. There are things there that I like well enough to buy, and also things that don’t seem any better than cheap crap from WalMart or Value City. I just don’t get why so many people are so enamored of the place. Their whole idea of “experience shopping” leaves me cold. I get that the idea of the annoying layout and lack of escape routes is to run you past as many things you might think about purchasing as possible. And I guess it must work on a certain percentage of the shopping population. It didn’t work on me, but it did annoy me and I did not buy a single thing. The food at the restaurant part did smell good, though. I didn’t buy any food either as the slowly wandering suburbanites were getting on my nerves.

That is another thing that really bothers me, but it’s certainly not unique to IKEA. I truly hate shopping so I am probably less tolerant of the slow meandering gazers than most people. I don’t mind that they might actually enjoy shopping and want to take their time about it. I do mind, and very seriously, that many of this type of shopper seem to have absolutely no concept that someone behind them might not appreciate how slowly they are moving if they are also blocking every inch of space along that path. Waiting for some of these shoppers was like waiting for a glacier, only less interesting to look at.

I feel better now that I’ve vented about all of that. I am glad that most of my shopping can be accomplished online which saves me from these experiences, and saves you all from having to read about it.

Where does the time go (9 of 31/44 of 274)

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I spent the first 18 years of my life in a place that does not observe daylight saving time, and I have never really become accustomed to the time change, especially the “spring forward” loss of an hour.

You wouldn’t think an hour’s difference in one’s routine would make so much difference, but I am always pretty useless on the Monday and Tuesday after the time change day, especially in the morning, since I am not a morning person at all. But it extends throughout the whole day and into the evening on Monday.

So that explains this very brief and uninspired post, just for NaBloPoMo really!

Giving up (3 of 31/38 of 274)

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Shortly after our original Rottweiler Heidi came to live with us in 1994, I made a very basic web page for her with a few photos, a couple of cute stories and a list of links about Rottweilers. Sometime over the next year or so, I was searching for more links to add to the page when I stumbled across Mindspring’s website. At that time, Mindspring was a regional ISP based in Atlanta. Their website included a page featuring their “Chief Executive Rottweiler” Henri, a three-legged Rottweiler belonging to an employee.

Of course I thought that was wonderful. I added the link to Heidi’s page, and had Heidi write to Henri, complimenting him on his business acumen and hoping that she, too, could one day achieve success in a technology career. I was shocked to receive a reply a couple of days later from Mindspring CEO Charles Brewer (or an assistant, I’ll never know for sure) with some kind words to Heidi about her page and the good resources she provided with her links. I wrote back on Heidi’s behalf and said that if Mindspring ever expanded to our area, we would use them as our ISP.

In 1997, they did come to Chicago, and I kept Heidi’s promise. Mindspring had excellent customer service and technical support. There were some growing pains, but things were always taken care of in a friendly and professional manner. We upgraded to DSL in 2000. When Earthlink bought out Mindspring, things were still fine for quite a while.

Somewhere along the line, Charles Brewer left to pursue other projects. Garry Betty passed away from cancer. Things started changing for the worse around that time. Support and customer service were outsourced. The service itself had pretty good uptime, but whenever I did have to contact support for any reason, it was simply hell to deal with the lower level outsourced technicians and their canned scripts and fake American names.

The last outage was the last straw. It lasted a little longer than usual, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem clearly lay outside my network, but the lower level tech put me through the entire script regardless. I could have dealt with that if he had actually escalated the call to the phone company to check the physical lines as he said he was going to do.

When I called back the next morning to check on the status, per tech’s instructions, the new tech said that he would put a trouble ticket in to the phone company. Ummm. It was done last night? No, apparently not.

This was still not the breaking point, as the phone company did more than their part and actually showed up shortly after I’d left for work and took care of their part of things.

The breaking point was the tech who called for me at work. He got off to a great start by asking one of my male co-workers if he was me. This particular co-worker does not sound like Barry White, but neither does he sound like a girl. Then, wonder tech continues by asking me to check on my service. I point out that he has called me at work, and the troubled DSL is at home. He repeats his request verbatim. I point out his error again, a little louder. He repeats his request again. I resort to profanity, ask for a supervisor, and am denied. I tell the tech I will check on the DSL when I get home and hang up.

Fortunately all was well. But that was the last straw, and after a dozen years, I have finally given up. The Mindspring I subscribed to is long gone. Heidi’s gone, Henri’s gone, and customer service is gone and way more dead than either of those beautiful dogs. And now I am gone. I made the call to cancel my account earlier tonight. The… again, outsourced… customer service rep noted that I had been a customer since 1997. Yeah. Had been. Not happy. Leaving.

I truly mourn the loss of the days that a company could still have a cutesy page with a “Chief Executive Rottweiler” and a CEO that took the time to see that a silly letter from a dog was answered. And a person could call for customer support and be able to talk to a person in their own country who could communicate effectively in their language.

Climate change (10 of 31/10 of 274)

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Sorry to those of you who have had to listen to a previous weather rant over at LiveJournal. This one will be slightly different, if that is any consolation!

For those of you who didn’t already know: I am an idiot who moved from Hawaii to Illinois. Away from year-round pleasant weather and the ocean, and to harsh weather extremes and urban ugliness. Not exactly a Mensa candidate for that move alone (which is sad, because otherwise I could qualify). I did want a change of scenery, and quite honestly, I do believe that everyone should go far away from home for at least a short time when they are young. The change of climate, though? Not so much.

So I do have a lot of weather rants, although you can see they are largely due to my own stupidity.

My rant today is not really about the weather, although I am certainly  not thrilled about the snow that fell last night and today. There was quite a lot of it, but the snowblower is functioning (it did give us a bad moment of doubt though) and my wonderful husband took care of most of the snow removal. All I had to do was the front steps. We help one of our elderly neighbors since his grown kids live a good distance away, and one of our other neighbors helped, too.

So that part was fine. The rant-worthy part is how some other people on the block are just plain jagoffs and never help with snow removal. I am not talking about elderly people or people with health issues. I am talking about people who are healthy enough to pitch in, but can barely manage to move their car off the snow route we live on so the plows can clear the road all the way to the curb.

Those of us clearing snow today were all fortysomething and older. There are younger people on the block, and kids of an appropriate age. Where the hell were they?

And while I’m on that topic: do kids of middle school age not shovel snow for extra cash any more, and why not? I know that kids now get “real” jobs as soon as they are old enough, but you would think that kids who are not old enough for real jobs would jump on the chance to earn some extra money. In the almost 20 years I’ve lived in this house, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times an enterprising youngster came to offer snow shoveling, leaf raking or lawn mowing.

We talked, or ranted, about this at work. As mentioned before, I grew up in Hawaii, so obviously I never shoveled snow for extra cash. But my business partners, also fortysomethings, all said they shoveled show for extra cash when they were youngsters. One lives near a school, and still can’t find a useful kid to help shovel. In fact, he said that not only did kids in his neighborhood not shovel, one of them stole his snow shovel off his porch.

Apparently that is an advantage to having Rottweilers often seen in one’s yard. Our shovels have never been stolen when we leave them out!

No snow tomorrow, just plummeting temperatures, so I guess I’ll need another rant topic by then!

Pieces of my life (29 of 30)

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Today I finally completed the task of moving my life from my Palm and various scraps of paper to my BlackBerry, and syncing BlackBerry with portions of my online presence. In the process of reviewing my available BlackBerry features, and updating my to-do list before moving it over, I’ve discovered some annoying stuff that needs to be fixed. Nothing to do with the technology, everything to do with carelessness or stupidity on either my part or more so, on someone else’s.

I am 99% sure that I was sold a more expensive mobile data plan than I really need. Shame on me for not going in there already knowing the differences between Verizon’s various data plans, but more shame on the customer service rep for not coming up with the right solution given the answers I gave on how my work email is set up and what functions I expected my BlackBerry to perform. So that’s got to be taken care of sooner rather than later.

Also, there is a health insurance issue that should have been easily corrected, yet apparently nothing has been done. I have been covered under my husband’s insurance for 7 years. I have not been covered by my own company’s group plan except for the first few months of his employment while waiting for him to be able to add me to his plan. Yet, all of a sudden, after 7 years of properly handled claims, they decide that my primary carrier is the company that I have not been insured with for almost that entire time. I called 2 weeks ago when the problem came to my attention. I was assured it was a simple matter and that it would be taken care of in a few days. Um, not so, apparently. I hate wasting time on multiple calls about the same issue, especially when someone said it was “easy” to fix.

And I have to stop doing this. Not like I don’t have enough to do already, and still I have spent time today looking for a Rottweiler theme for the BlackBerry. Not finding one to my liking (yes, there were a couple of them available) I then spent time looking for information on how to create my own. Stop me before I hurt myself!