Category: Rant

Freecycle, the last straw

Ok, that’s it. I want to recycle as much as the next person, but the local moderator is a moron. This time I have a bunch of moving boxes. I’m going to put them out for recycling, but I thought I’d tell the Freecycle community that they’re going to be there in case somebody wants to pick some of them off. But I don’t want to be answering every email about them or holding them for pickup – so I put my address in the message and said when they were going out and when they’re going to be picked up. And the damn moderator rejected the message saying “No addresses allowed”.

I thought it was my call whether I wanted to expose myself like that, not some over blown facist moderator?

Anyway, I give up on Freecycle. Given a choice between dealing with that asshole moderator and her made-up rules and putting stuff in landfill, I vote for the landfill.

When did UPS become a bunch of fuckwads?

Years ago, UPS would attempt to deliver during the day, and if you missed it, you could phone up and find out your local depot, and after 8pm or so, after the trucks had returned, you could go down to the depot and pick it up. But if you decided not to pick it up, they’d automatically attempt delivery the next day. But not any more.

They attempted to deliver a package yesterday. We weren’t there to recieve it and the Post It note says that they’ll try the next day (today). Nobody was going to be around today to recieve it, so Vicki called their 800 number, and used some automatic system to tell them not to deliver it today. And according to their on-line tracking system, they got that message on time, and they weren’t going to deliver it today. Except they *did* attempt to deliver it today. And so I called to complain about this, and to ask if I could go to the depot to pick it up, they told me I couldn’t change anything because there was a pending change request. For the hold that didn’t happen. But the “helpful” clerk said they’d call the local depot and have them call me. Which they didn’t do, of course. But for some damn reason, the on-line site now says that the customer requested that the package be held at the depot! And still nobody has told me which depot it is. So I had to call again to find out what depot it’s at. And it turns out that this depot is closed to the public after 7pm, so no wonder you can’t come in after the trucks return.

So they’ve taken a system that was extremely flexible and useful, and replaced it with a system of automatic voice response systems that put in holds that don’t work, and the sort of inflexibility and user hostility that would make a Soviet civil servant blush.

Ok, that was iPod number 5, bring on number 6

So my replacement iPod arrived yesterday while I was at work. First thing when I get home, I plug it in and start updating it. But as it’s loading 4,000 songs, after two or three hours I noticed that I accidentally selected the Punk playlist instead of the Classical one to auto update on it, and I wanted Classical this time. So I attempt to change it, first by changing the iPod settings in iTunes, then by selecting “Update iPod”, and finally by ejecting it. Oh, I should mention that by this point, the iPod is scorching hot to the touch. By this time, though, iTunes is not responding, so I attempt a “Force Quit”. It won’t quit. I try a few more times. Still no luck. I try ejecting the iPod icon on the Finder, and now the Finder isn’t responding and won’t do a “Force Restart”. Then I notice that the clock on the menu bar hasn’t updated since I started loading the iPod. Time for drastic measures, I think, and restart the computer.

When it restarts, iTunes comes up but doesn’t see the iPod, and the iPod is display an icon of a folder with an exclamation mark. I try using iPod Updater to “Restore” the software. Then iTunes says that my iPod software has to be updated to 1.3 and launches the iPod updater again (I have several different versions of the iPod Updater on my system, and I guess I didn’t use the most recent one when I did the “Restore”). It tells me that the update is complete and to unplug and replug the iPod to continue, and when I do it tells me that it needs to update to 1.3, and then that the update is complete, and to unplug and replug the iPod to continue. Somewhere along the way iTunes then tells me that there is a 1.4 update available, and I go to the Apple web site to download the latest updater (and I delete all the other updaters), which tells me that it’s installing 1.5. I do so, and that leads to another cycle of iTunes and Finder hangs. I try using the “Restore” option in the iPod Updater again, with no different results, but eventually it tells me that it’s loading songs, and then after loading one song and starting on the other, iTunes and the Finder hang again.

I go through a bunch of different combinations of software restores, reboots and plugging it in with or without iTunes or the iPod Updater already started. Eventually I’m at the situation I’m at now, where the computer won’t see the iPod at all, and the iPod is showing a new icon, that of a disk with an exclamation point.

You know, this is the 4th time that Apple has send me a faulty iPod if you count the time they sent me back iPod #3 saying there was nothing wrong with it and I sent it back because they hadn’t read my letter on how to reproduce the problem. I don’t know if they’re making any money off of this purchase, but I suspect that it’s a major profit center for DHL.

Freecycle continues to piss me off

I got through the Word document hurdle I blogged about earlier by sending the moderators a complaint, which was responded to with a “All you had to do was ask, no reason to get so huffy” response. I guess learning is not something they do well, and suggesting they do something in a way that benefits everybody is not the nice thing to do. All has been well and good, I’ve gotten rid of three things and gotten one thing through the service. Today I thought I’d put out a “WANTED” looking for a filing cabinet. Now, it’s normal on Freecycle to put your location when you offer something, because then if you want that something you can decide whether or not it’s worth your while going to that part of the city to pick it up or not. But it doesn’t make sense to me to put the location in a “WANTED” message, because surely it’s up to you, as the wanter, to decide whether whoever has it is too far away from you or not. But the damn moderator rewrote my subject line to include my location. So now I just know that people on the other side of town are going to say “I won’t bother offering him this file cabinet, because it’s not worth travelling cross town to pick it up”.

Update: The response from the group moderator is “I just enforce the rules, I don’t make them up”, however I looked at both the Word document with the local rules and the Freecycle’s main FAQ and neither of them has it as a rule that WANTED items should have a location. One ettiquette pointer suggests a location on all posts, but it’s not a rule. One thing that is stated as a rule, however, is that moderators should not moderate every single post for ettiquette violations.