Rants and Revelations

I was walking through a shopping mall with my new Great Big Sea CD in my
hand and an old Great Big Sea CD playing on my iPod. As it changed from
one song to another, the song didn’t start. I pulled it out of my pocket
and looked, and the display seemed frozen – it wouldn’t react to any of
the buttons. So I did a full reset, and got the icon showing a folder
with an exclamation point. So I did another full reset – and this time I
got an icon showing a disk and a magnifying glass, and then a while later
I got the “sad ipod” icon.

While messing around to see if I could fix it, I noticed some strange
noises while it was booting. And afterwards I was trying to take it take
it out of the Marware case it lives in and something is rattling around
inside it.

This is so strange – you’d expect rattly noises if I’d dropped it and it
immediately stopped working, but I’d been listening to it.

Oh, and just to make sure this day is perfect, the Apple web site where you order a repair tells me that I’m giving an invalid serial number, so I can’t even have the privilege of paying $260 to fix it.

Once again the guy three cubes down is using his speaker phone to carry on a long conversation even though he’s the only one listening to this end of the conversation. And rather than giving in to the temptation to stab him 400 or 500 times with a mechanical pencil, I’m just shoving the ear buds of my iPod deeper into my ears and turning up the volume.

Ah, tranquility.

Now if only the cubicle shaking thumps that happen about 10-20 times an hour would stop.

If there’s one thing I hate about the first of the month, it’s the flood of people on my mailing lists who get their monthly mailing list reminder, and rather than reading the damn thing and following the directions, send me email saying “please change my email address” or “please unsubscribe me”. 99% of the time, they don’t even tell me which mailing list, not that I care because I’m not going to do it manually. Today is running true to form – I’ve got 3 of these so far, and will probably get another 5 or so before the day is out, and a bunch more trickling in through the week.

Is it so god-damned hard to read and understand a few simple directions?

And of course, let’s never forget the people with those idiotic vacation messages. You know, back in 1987 I used “vacation” that came with BSD Unix, and *it* knew enough not to send vacation replies back to mailing lists. So why don’t the current crop of GUI-ridden crapware mail programs understand that simple concept?