by Matt | Jan 9, 2009 | Aggravation
I have a few quick words of advice for our friends at the United States Postal Service. Specifically “please stop sucking”. I’ve got a package, from Amazon, floating around in the mail-room ether, because the USPS can’t seem to provide any tracking information like any of the other shipping companies. It’s really not that hard. Everything has a number and a bar-code. SCAN IT. Scan it when it arrives, when it leaves, when it goes on a truck, when it’s lonely and depressed and most importantly, when it gets delivered. Scan it on happy days, on sad days, on sunny days and on crappy Tuesdays in November when it’s raining and no one wants to go outside. Scan the fucking package like it was you job and you were fucking pleased to do it.
I don’t understand, even as a government agency, how you plan to provide good service and continue operating when you “update the tracking information every evening at 6pm”. Really? Is that really what your going to go? Because a whole lot of shit can happen between “Arrived in Houston” at 6pm on Thursday and 6pm the next day when it’s supposed to be delivered. Has my package been delivered? Is it stuck on a load dock somewhere? Has it gone missing? Is it still on time? I don’t know… because it’s not yet 6pm and I’m not fucking Sherlock Holmes. By the time they get around to “updating” their tracking information, I’ll be home already, and what fucking good does that do me?
Really, why do you even deliver packages USPS? What’s the point? UPS has got large packages covered, which they seem to enjoy mangling, Fedex has the “it needs to be there yesterday” market covered, and you, you have Christmas cards and Elvis stamps. Just stick to what you’re good at. Just deliver my Netflix and my birthday card from my grandmother and stop trying to be the “preferred” shipper of anything. Thank you.
by Matt | Jan 9, 2009 | Personal
I normally don’t post this sort of thing. Usually my humanitarian efforts are limited to volunteering at our church during Christmas, but this, this is something else entirely. It’s well put together and actually quite a good audio mix. Take a look.
by Matt | Jan 8, 2009 | Personal
Trying to update service packs, for Windows XP, running in Parallels, on my Mac Book Pro = The least amount of fun I’ve had today. Wow does it suck.
by Matt | Dec 31, 2008 | Work
Apparently, while I’m off this week on vacation, the rest of my office has become either super motivated or insane. I’m going to put my money on insane. We had discussed last week our “goals” for 2009, and since our company is also big on continuing education and learning new skills, we also talked about things we might like to learn or get training on in 2009. I had mentioned my desire to learn more advanced CSS and PHP as well as a little more javascript and things of that nature. Apparently, I don’t get to choose, which to me defeats the purpose, because I just got an email from a co-worker, who’s acting like they’re in charge of our learning, declaring that we’ll all be learning Flash in January and he even gave out our first ASSIGNMENT.
I’m trying to work out a way of talking to him about it without sounding like an asshole, but I really have zero desire to learn Flash. It’s a non-standard, plugin requiring nuisance that, in my opinion, is actually fading away and won’t be very useful down the line. I would much much rather learn some heavy CSS, or something that’s a web standard than something that, in my previous experience, is always a pain in the ass.
It’s not that I can wrap my head around it. I’ve actually used Flash before. I’m familiar with the concepts, the timeline, all that good stuff. It’s just that I don’t WANT to learn it. I’ve got projects galore next year, all of them on the web and not a single one of them can or will support Flash. It’s simply not something I design for, develop, enjoy, use or would recommend using. I think it’s nearly a dead technology. The Flash bubble burst a long time ago and now the only people that use it, use it for things like navigation, or things that could be easily accomplished with more compatible technologies like Scriptaculous.
I’ll buck up and pretend to learn a little, but really, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that it’s A) been decided for me what we’re going to learn and B) it’s something so not worth my time that I’m hardly motivated to do it at all. But, I guess that’s what being “part of a team” is all about. Now all those Office jokes make sense.
by Matt | Dec 30, 2008 | Personal
I don’t really know what I expected, I haven’t been to the dentist in about 15 years. On Saturday, one of my fillings broke and I had a big hole in one of my back teeth. Obviously I had to go get that fixed. I went this morning and now I have a temporary cap in there for the moment, and I’m waiting for the feeling to return to my face. I get to have a full root canal and a crown at some point next week. I can’t wait. The upside is that since I went today (2008) and I’ll go back next week (2009) I’ll be on different calendar years and the insurance has to pay out more. They pay 80% towards it and a max of $2k a year. I still have to cover 20% but what I did today doesn’t come out of my max for next year, so that’s good.
Anyway, my head is (obviously) splitting and I’m going to go lay down.
Matt out.
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