Category Archives: This is unacceptable…

Fie on you, CTA farecards

Posted on by
Reply

“There is one circumstance where a Chicago Card Plus cannot be used to pay for up to seven customers: If six or fewer customers begin their trip while using one card, and they attempt to transfer to another bus or rail line with customers who were not present at the origin of the trip, the card will not be accepted for fare payment of the additional customers.”

So basically… if Sean comes home from work right now, and we wish to go out together before his transfers have expired, I need to use a different card because passback won’t work.

We already experienced this once, last week. I had just come home, and the two of us needed to get to State Farm to sign some forms and turn in my car key (since I no longer had the car and all — don’t know why they didn’t try to get that from me when they came and towed it, or why they didn’t try to let me know they were in fact planning to tow it — but I digress). We didn’t have any cash, and I just had the one farecard, but I thought — gee! There’s that nifty passback feature. We can share.

Nope. Doesn’t work that way. The farebox just flashes “invalid” or somesuch when you try it, and the driver gets all uppity.

I found this ancient discussion about the passback “feature”. I’m glad to see that the annoyance has carried over to the new Chicago Cards… Do people not use passback, or something?

I guess we’ll probably buy a second (non 30-day pass) card just for this purpose. Dumb. Since you can’t get transfers with cash anymore (also dumb).

Why, God? WHY!?

Posted on by
22

My car was the subject of a Big Mac Attack sometime between 2am and 7am this morning. I managed to get most of the two all-beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and sesame seed bun off. But there is special sauce all over my windshield, and I hate Jesus.

Yay! I love utility companies!

Posted on by
Reply

Peoples Energy, I shake my fist at you. $16.24 activation charge? For what? To change the information on the already existing, already working account? Don’t you think that if you are going to charge $16.24 for this service that you should make some effort to at least get that information right?

Who is Dean Payne? I know that my handwriting can be a little bit messy sometimes (although I’m pretty careful about it in cases where I would like people to copy something down accurately). But if anything, half of my letters are scribbles that look like esses (at least gee, wi, dee, bee, pee, jay, and duh… ess…) I’m reasonably sure that I couldn’t possibly have made the name Sean look like Dean. And it’s a curious fact that the letter dee is right next to ess on the keyboard…

You bastards didn’t even bother to change the address on the account. You have the street number wrong. You have the apartment number wrong. It’s probably a fluke that the bill wound up in the right state. It took three weeks to convince you that my apartment existed, and even then, your customer service representatives could not figure out how to enter it into the computer. The only apartment at this address on record is “basement”. There is no basement here…

I confuses me why the account is in my husband’s name (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) in the first place, since apparently you were unable to open an account using his SSN when we called you and tried. You told us that Sean was already in your system, and that he owed you several hundreds of dollars. I wonder whose number is now incorrectly associated with us.

I look forward to paying you unnecessarily large sums of my money every month for what I hope will continue to be sub-par service.

P.S. – Metric system, plz. WTF is a “therm”. People that aren’t stupid measure in joules.

…

Speaking of idiotic organizations, my green card arrived today, miraculously. The address on the envelope doesn’t exist… The USPS, in a freakish episode of competenceness managed to get it to its destination. And the mailman, in a freakish episode of paying attention to what the hell he was doing managed to put it into the mailbox instead of onto the floor beneath it as usual. Thanks, mailman! That was nice of you!

9-64-090 (e), eh?

Posted on by
10

Rebuttal: 9-64-090 (k).

So, yeah. Nice new apartment in Chicago. In a residential parking zone. I just moved here. I do not have a city sticker. I do not have a residential parking permit. I do not have any of the 87 other things my car needs to be legal in this state. I am not required to have these things yet, because there is a 30 day grace period. There is no way for anybody looking at my car to know that, though. Those stickers are what keeps cars on this street from being ticketed and/or towed. So everytime I go outside, there’s a happy orange suprise waiting for me on my windshield. I would gladly pay for the darn stickers, but it’s a long weekend. I would have paid for them first chance I got, on Friday, but the paperwork I needed was still buried in a box somewhere. I will pay for them sometime in the near future, but in the meantime… please to not be towing my car, thx. Luckily, this street is only a tow zone during speicial events. Unluckily, Jimmy Buffet counts as a special event, and he’s playing just down the road. I guess it’s okay, unless they decide to tow me in the next two hours or so… but still. Very lame. Maybe I’ll just go sit on my hood until then. Or maybe I’ll just stick a copy of my lease and a note in giant magic marker letters with lots of exclamation points on my window. Or maybe I’ll just sit here eating ice cream and not watching TV or using the internet at any acceptable speed because our cable isn’t hooked up yet. Yes.

He sells books because it’s all he’s ALLOWED to sell.

Posted on by
10

Kevin Trudeau’s book of bullshit Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About is a bestseller? According to The Daily Show, anyhoo. People are stupidlyer than I thought. And I didn’t think that they were generally very smart to begin with. Even if it was rational for people watching the infomercial to believe that there were natural cures to diabetes/cancer/herpes that somehow hadn’t already been on the front page of the newspaper because there’s some sinister they keeping them a secret… shouldn’t it offend their sensibilities just a wee to have Kevin pretend to be the good guy (and he is not ), to hear him claim that they won’t let the secrets get out because “it’s all about the money”, and then to be asked to fork over $29.95 for the book (BTW, the cures aren’t even in the book — you also need to subscribe to the newsletter and mailing list for extra $$$ for those)? Let me tell you… I contemplated “losing” the copy of the infomercial that my TV station had more than a few times. Not only is Kevin Trudeau taking advantage of people, but he’s a complete and utter moron, and the infomercial is just bloody annoying. Possibly moreso than The 700 Club. Wait. No. Nothing beats The 700 Club. Not even Bill O’Reilly (speaking of Billy boy… I think I agreed with him for the first time ever when he spoke out against Kevin Trudeau recently).

This is my favourite part of the infomercial:

There are health freedoms in this country that are being taken away from us. There are more people sick today than ever before. There are more people that are overweight. There are more people that have diabetes. There are more people that have cancer. There are more people that have heart disease. There are more people that have migraine headaches. There are more people that have arthritis. There are more people that have virtually every major health abnormality.

Yes, Kevy. There are more people. Period. Point, plz? He sounds like enough of an idiot here even before anyone gets around to pointing out anything about better diagnosis or treatment of these diseases (i.e. nobody had epilepsy in the 16th century, when it was so obvious at the time that the symptoms were caused by demons (also the cause of just about every other disease, I’m sure), and that the cure was exorcism — that’s an increase in the number of cases of oh… infinity percent), or that people are also living longer than ever before… Yes, it’s so obvious. Modern medicine is failing us. Miserably.

Which reminds me how happy I am that I no longer work at Fox. I will never again have to watch 12 infomercials over a weekend, Fox News Sunday, or The 700 Club. We all know that I still will, because I just love getting myself angry… but I don’t have to anymore. I am doing a little dance of joy right now, but you can’t see it.

Similes and Metaphors

Posted on by
9

I’ve never been fond of them, except when employed by Douglas Adams.

I don’t have any particular reason for my distaste, I just find them generally annoying. But here’s a good argument for avoiding them (if you didn’t already clue in to the danger after all of that Gulag nonsense): if you use a simile or metaphor, some idiot out there is going to take you literally. Case in point — this is what Hoagie had to say yesterday after someone made the mistake of using a simile to describe materials found on Tempel 1:

Now, examine carefully Chick Woodward’s extremely tantalizing statement: “[the] silicates … might even be similar to the beach sand here in Hawaii ….”

Why choose THAT particular comparison … unless you meant it?

“Beach sand” is a highly specific, very weathered end product of a long history of planetary sedimentary processes … which can take place only on highly evolved, Earth-like (or, Mars-like) planets (with lots of flowing, liquid water)! To make that specific comparison, as a scientist, one can only think that Woodward was directly hinting at the “exploded planet hypothesis” itself … but without naming it as such–

This is where I bash my head into a brick wall. Repeatedly. (Actually, it got a good chuckle out of me. That and a whole lot of head shaking.)

P.S. If there’s anyone out there that abuses italics more than I do, it’s this guy. And please, Richard… quit it with the scare quotes. If there’s one thing I hate more than similes or metaphors, it’s the incorrect use of quotation marks.

Time Warp

Posted on by
Reply

All of the TV stations we receive have apparently decided as one to air every single program an hour earlier, to confuse us and to make us all miss [insert title of whichever reality show is hip this week here]. Except for the TV stations in Indiana. I guess they were left out of the conspiracy.

Yep. That must be what happened.

Totally unrelated: It seems like it gets light outside far too early these days. I can’t sleep after the sun is up, so someone should either buy me some curtains, or invent some kind of a magical *timeshifting* device that would turn all of the clocks forward by, oh… about an hour or so would do, I suppose.