Occasionally, my friend Brent shares with me one of the hundred or so conversations he has with one of the random people that call in to the customer support lines that he manages. Someone like me, who works in a small office and endures a small volume of phone calls, might have one bad experience per month of experiences. Someone like Brent, who is on-hand mostly to deal with the negative, endures a barrage of weird shit every day.
There are people who are pissed off about being amidst a divorce that get a hold of the 800 number and have him on the phone for several minutes before they even get to the reason they called. They want their kids back; he just wants to help fix their windshield.
A mild issue of displacement.
A lot of people cry. Sometimes they have good reasons to, although not so much related to glass replacement.
Today, an utterly appalled lady called in to complain because a technician showed up to her door to replace her windshield -- (unknowingly) with his zipper down. She wanted to make sure that her account was noted that a "pervert" showed up at her house and she wanted compensation. All this through tears.
They gave her fifty bucks.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
dont you ppl care any more?
As someone who went through a moderate amount of a college journalism major before switching to something a little less...stressful, I have grown increasingly appalled by not only how much our grasp of grammar seems to be slipping away from us as a culture, but how much we apparently don't even care that we're showing off our mistakes.
It takes a certain amount of grammatical mastery before I even take a person or publication seriously; I admit my bias right there. I give a little leeway due to some personal experiences with people I know who are completely unable to spell or form coherent sentences on "paper" and are, in person, successful at their jobs and lives. But get your shit together, people.
The point is, that language is a tool. It's a tool that allows you to show attributes about your point of view, intellect, or personality that you don't otherwise have to spell out to a reader. It allows you to make a statement about yourself by your correct or incorrect usage of words, concepts and phrases and slang. It's a tool that lets me know if you're inherently racist and ignorant or well-educated and full of insight. Language is so strongly tied to emotion, is so powerful, and we cast it around casually without regard and with shameful abandon.
We all have the crutch of spell-checkers, oft-intrusive squiggly green and red underlines, and even that fucking MS Office paper clip to help us out. To my dismay, there is a trend in word processing to make assumption as to the writer's intent and to just automatically substitute a correctly spelled best-guessed word in place of a perceived incorrectly spelled word without so much as the typist even making notice of it. This much infuriates me. You may never actually realize how to spell certain words, because each time you make the mistake it is auto-corrected. What happens when you have to make a sign. No squiggles to help you now, lazy butt!
I have noticed an increased number of spelling mistakes on actual printed and approved final documents. Menus, signs, business cards... I even saw one on a television game show last night. I have seen them in recipes printed in magazines that are distributed to tens of thousands of people. Why am I going to do business with you when you can't even spell your street name? Guinness is spelled just like that. Lavender does not end in "AR". A LOT of things don't end in "AR". It's like one perpetual unintentional pirate joke after another.
I SAW SHERBET SPELLED LIKE SHERBERT. Seriously?! Sherbert?! This was not even at a Chinese restaurant, this was on television.
Chinese restaurants are exempt from this note, thanks.
It takes a certain amount of grammatical mastery before I even take a person or publication seriously; I admit my bias right there. I give a little leeway due to some personal experiences with people I know who are completely unable to spell or form coherent sentences on "paper" and are, in person, successful at their jobs and lives. But get your shit together, people.
The point is, that language is a tool. It's a tool that allows you to show attributes about your point of view, intellect, or personality that you don't otherwise have to spell out to a reader. It allows you to make a statement about yourself by your correct or incorrect usage of words, concepts and phrases and slang. It's a tool that lets me know if you're inherently racist and ignorant or well-educated and full of insight. Language is so strongly tied to emotion, is so powerful, and we cast it around casually without regard and with shameful abandon.
We all have the crutch of spell-checkers, oft-intrusive squiggly green and red underlines, and even that fucking MS Office paper clip to help us out. To my dismay, there is a trend in word processing to make assumption as to the writer's intent and to just automatically substitute a correctly spelled best-guessed word in place of a perceived incorrectly spelled word without so much as the typist even making notice of it. This much infuriates me. You may never actually realize how to spell certain words, because each time you make the mistake it is auto-corrected. What happens when you have to make a sign. No squiggles to help you now, lazy butt!
I have noticed an increased number of spelling mistakes on actual printed and approved final documents. Menus, signs, business cards... I even saw one on a television game show last night. I have seen them in recipes printed in magazines that are distributed to tens of thousands of people. Why am I going to do business with you when you can't even spell your street name? Guinness is spelled just like that. Lavender does not end in "AR". A LOT of things don't end in "AR". It's like one perpetual unintentional pirate joke after another.
I SAW SHERBET SPELLED LIKE SHERBERT. Seriously?! Sherbert?! This was not even at a Chinese restaurant, this was on television.
Chinese restaurants are exempt from this note, thanks.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Is that... Judge Judy?
If I weren't such a learned person, I would blame it on witchcraft. Wandering spirits, maybe. Someone from "beyond" trying to communicate with me over the same frequency that Bluetooth utilizes.
Last week my dad installed a rear-view camera in my Insight. I'd probably appreciate its novelty if it weren't for its necessity. 'Insight' was not the most accurate name for this vehicle. Anyhow, it plugs into the cigarette lighter and mounts on my air vent. It's a small screen much like a digital camera's screen. The actual camera is mounted above my license plate and communicates wirelessly with the display in-car. It only engages when the car is in reverse. It's a camera; that's all it does.
Well. That's all it's supposed to do.
But when I was driving down 315 last week, around the Riverside curve, the camera flickered on as television static does in between lost channels. I blinked. It happened again, and this time it looked as though an image was on the screen. Rounding out the curve, by Ackerman, I was fully watching Judge Judy upside-down on my rear-view camera display.
I have found fun little pockets around town where my camera will pick up signals emitted from everything from WBNS to baby monitors. On my way to hockey in Grandview, I can pick up some episodes of Friends on the CW. In downtown Worthington, I pick up the security camera from one of the "olde" shops but I haven't yet determined which one.
In Hilliard, I watched a baby crawl around in her crib.
I am afraid I will see something I don't want to see.
Like Seinfeld.
Last week my dad installed a rear-view camera in my Insight. I'd probably appreciate its novelty if it weren't for its necessity. 'Insight' was not the most accurate name for this vehicle. Anyhow, it plugs into the cigarette lighter and mounts on my air vent. It's a small screen much like a digital camera's screen. The actual camera is mounted above my license plate and communicates wirelessly with the display in-car. It only engages when the car is in reverse. It's a camera; that's all it does.
Well. That's all it's supposed to do.
But when I was driving down 315 last week, around the Riverside curve, the camera flickered on as television static does in between lost channels. I blinked. It happened again, and this time it looked as though an image was on the screen. Rounding out the curve, by Ackerman, I was fully watching Judge Judy upside-down on my rear-view camera display.
I have found fun little pockets around town where my camera will pick up signals emitted from everything from WBNS to baby monitors. On my way to hockey in Grandview, I can pick up some episodes of Friends on the CW. In downtown Worthington, I pick up the security camera from one of the "olde" shops but I haven't yet determined which one.
In Hilliard, I watched a baby crawl around in her crib.
I am afraid I will see something I don't want to see.
Like Seinfeld.
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