rants

Dear IHOP,
At the end of September I visited your brand new Marina Del Rey location with several of my co-workers. Everyone in my office had been excited for months while we waited for you to open. When you decided last year to demolish the friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town bagel shop that we all knew and loved, we were very sad. But we were glad when we learned that an IHOP — a friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town restaurant — was taking its place.

I ordered a big breakfast even though it was my lunch break. We all did. Terrific eggs, two pancakes smothered in strawberries, bacon, ham, hash browns. So good. I thought that $11.94 was a lot to pay for breakfast and coffee and an orange juice, but I understand that you have to charge $3.00 for a glass of orange juice because oranges are so hard to get here in southern California. I left a $3.06 tip because I like nice round numbers and the service was pretty good.

Imagine my surprise when I connected to my bank to synchronize Microsoft Money that night and realized I was charged $25.00 instead! Sure, I suppose it could have been a typo, but I’m guessing that Hector the waiter pocketed that extra ten-spot with glee. My penmanship isn’t brilliant, but I’m fairly certain that anyone can tell the difference between my 1s and my 2s. I was a little bit bothered, but not irate.

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Where do I go to complain about grocery store shenanigans? I’m at the end of my rope with Ralph’s, the local supermarket here in Los Angeles. There are two things they are doing to blatantly defraud customers and it’s driving me crazy.

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I receive an incredible amount of spam. I have a dozen or so email accounts and I manage about two dozen websites. Plus I run the IT department at my office. I get about 500 spam comments and 1500 spam pingbacks and / or trackbacks on blogs each day, and that’s with Akismet and a captcha installed. If I had to guess I’d say I get somewhere around 1500 spam emails each day. I have both Outlook’s internal spam-catcher and SpamBayes running, but some still slip into my Inbox. I’ve gotten quite good at scanning and realizing instantly if something is for me or for the trash.

This morning a piece of spam managed to make it into my Inbox and it momentarily shocked me. I hardly ever look at the subject line of email these days. The part that I noticed said, “This is not meant to be an insult or anything but people are talking at work about your weight.” Whoa! I mean, I’m not carrying around a spare tire or anything, but I’ve been knocking back M&Ms and Almond Joys like a madman since Halloween so when I saw that I freaked. Sure it was only for just that millisecond before my brain realized it was spam, but still. Talk about a way to catch someone’s attention!

I really don’t understand how this particular message is supposed to fool anyone. I don’t have anyone at my office named “Mark” and even if I did there’s no way he’d mail me at the completely obscure alias of a domain nobody at work even knows I own. This guy must be sending millions of these if he expects to get any sort of response.

On January 18 of this year I got a speeding ticket for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone on a barren stretch of Sawtelle Avenue at about 7 a.m.

This morning I drove behind two CHP patrol cars — one was license plate #1204664 — doing between 54 and 57 mph for at least two miles on the exact same stretch of Sawtelle. They obviously weren’t in the act of pursuit or anything. They stopped to get gas.

There really should be a place to report law enforcement personnel who abuse their power like that. Cops in LA are notoriously bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat behind an LAPD officer who flipped on lights and sirens just to get through a red light.

Once again I found myself in trouble at the Los Angeles International Airport, and once again it was (arguably) my own damn fault. Last Thursday I flew Southwest to Providence, Rhode Island to testify in court on behalf of my dad, who was in the midst of a textbook “frivolous lawsuit”. I detest being late in general, and even more so when it comes to flying. I am the guy that gets to the airport at least two hours in advance. My adventure began almost as soon as I got out of my friend’s car.

I was told by the Southwest skycaps at the curbside check-in that my flight was canceled. “What?! Why?!” I exclaimed. I was told by the first skycap that it was because of inclement weather in Rhode Island. He directed me to his superior, who told me that it was because of a mechanical problem with the plane. (Much later in the day I would be told that the flight was canceled because there simply weren’t enough people wanting to fly from LA to Providence that day to justify sending an entire plane on the route.) She took my luggage and got me on the next flight, due to leave for Phoenix in three hours.

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We have a Norstar phone system in my office. Sometimes people leave me voicemails on this system. When I look at my phone, it shows “Messages” in the little digital display so I know I must check my messages. To do this I press the “Check VM” button and enter my super secret password. Here’s what drives me crazy: The system robot says, “You have three new messages. To listen to your new messages, press 2,” and then ten other options. I am checking my voice mail. Of course I want to hear my new messages. Why in the world would I check my voicemail and not want to hear my new messages? (Cingular handles this perfectly, by the way. When I check my cell phone voice mail the system robot says, “You have seventeen new messages. The first message was received yesterday at 2 pm from some phone number, and here it is …”)

That’s only mildly annoying, though. What really drives me over a cliff is that once I have listened to the (usually quite unimportant) message, I have to listen to all NINE options before I’m able to delete the thing. “Press 1 to listen to the message envelope. Press 2 to forward the message. Press 3 to reply to the message. Press 4 to replay the message. Press 5 to hear the next message. Press 6 to hear the previous message. Press 7 to save the message. Press 8 to delete the message. Press 9 to hear more options.” I have to listen to all of that before I can delete the damn thing! If I press 8 while the system robot is still talking it ignores me until it has finished reading me all nine options! So. The vast majority of the time, I am simply going to delete the message. The option to delete should be NUMBER ONE. And under no circumstances in any universe should I possibly be forced to listen to all the options before making my choice!

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“When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters. …
Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research.”

– from The Handwriting Is on the Wall

I’ve been complaining about the decline in my own penmanship for years now. I used to take pride in how beautiful, in particular, my lowercase e and t looked. And don’t get me started on my q. It was lovely. Truly a sight to behold. Now I am ashamed to see my own handwriting. Unless I’m sending a check — and that’s rare these days, too — I just don’t ever need to use a pen or pencil. Blast this damn keyboard!

Words cannot describe how frustrating is it to drive anywhere in Los Angeles. The part that really slays you is when you realize that the problem is not bad drivers. (Warning: It will take you at least a solid year to come to this realization.) The real problem is the traffic infrastructure: traffic lights, stop signs, road configurations, and construction. I’ve written before about the supreme idiocy of the Santa Monica Boulevard Transit Parkway Project. Today I was quite upset to learn that in 2005 the Federal government — not money from my California tax dollars, but from my Federal taxes — granted $1,611,962,012 to the California Department of Transportation. And yet it still takes 30 minutes to drive 5 miles.

I happen to be one of the (apparently very few) people in this country that has not only read the Constitution of the United States, but also understands it and — by gosh! — thinks it’s a pretty good way to run a country. So I tend to get really, really upset when presented with a “law” that I know is not a law.

At fozbaca.org I found a link to an excellent article written by a U.S. citizen about how to fly without any identification. You do realize that there is no “law” that says you must present ID to get on a plane, right? According to this article, the airlines just want to make sure you’re not using someone else’s frequent flyer miles. They blame it on the government because, well, just about everyone is a sucker.

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Here’s something that’s been nagging at me lately: Why don’t you ever see commercials for fruits and vegetables? I realize that apples and bananas and squash aren’t really all that sexy, and the mega-corporations that sell them all — Dole, etc. — do some vague advertising for their processed products (like OJ and pineapple chunks). But where are the celebrity endorsements? It seems like every other day there’s a new report on how damn fat everyone is. The government blows money like a drunk at a strip club on pointless crap like invading other countries and getting boneheads elected to office. Why don’t the people running this country shell out a few bucks for a tomato ad to run during Fear Factor? Wouldn’t it be great to see Paris Hilton being sexy peeling a banana? How many little American chubbies would skip Taco Bell and grab an apple if Tom Cruise popped into prime time to say how cool it was to eat one? Just a thought …

Reason #4,213 Why People Get Frustrated with Microsoft:

Can anyone tell me if I really need Java 2 Runtime Environment, SE v1.4.2_03 and J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 3? These things are ridiculous. Each one is over 100MB! What a waste.

How’s this for retarded? I recently moved. Yesterday I went to Washington Mutual’s website to change my address for my checking account. Today I realized that I am out of checks. That’s okay. I can order checks on-line and they get delivered in like three days. But when I went to the website to order a new set of checks, I got this message:

We’re sorry. Our records indicate that you have changed your address within the last 30 days. For your security, we do not allow web- or phone-based check orders within 30 days of an address change. Please visit a financial center or wait 30 days to submit this order.

Gaah! How in the world is this making my life more secure??

For Christmas ‘04 I got my girlfriend a shiny new HP Photosmart 7960. She loves it. It prints fabulous, high-quality images and it comes with some great photo-printing software. Sure you have to mortgage your house to keep the ink flowing, but you knew that was going to be the case when you bought the thing, right?

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