Gizmo Has Gremlins
Dear Gizmo Project,
I have a bone to pick with you. Sunday morning I had a podcast to record and, well, Gizmo Project is my main VOIP tool. Your built in call recording and overall good audio quality makes it a logical choice for these P2P calls.
However, Sunday morning, your entire service was down. Not only was it down, but had been down for at least about an hour remained down a two hours afterward. We tried to jerry-rig something using Skype but we ran out of time before we could get everything completely in place.
However, what bothered me about the whole ordeal wasn’t that Gizmo Project and your SIP server went down at an inopportune time, but that no one at Gizmo Project was doing a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a forum posting about the outage, one started by a user and maintained by other users, but no one from Gizmo Project itself posted on it until today, over 24 hours AFTER the outage was resolved.
Still worse is that there is no system status indicator. Skype has one. even Cox Communications, the bane of my customer service existence, has one. Why don’t you?
However, the ultimate slap in the face is what happens when you Google for “Gizmo Project” and “System Status”. You find this forum post where an admin tells a user requesting a system status feature that “We are NOT going to create a public status page any time in the near future.”
That, my friends, is bullshit and I’ll tell you why.
Get Off My Damn Phone
Dear Cox Communications,
You called me on my hone phone today, we were off on the wrong foot already. My home phone is something of a backup, a handy tool for when the Sprint network takes a swan dive into the Mississippi River or my older relatives want to call without using the newfangled cellurar technology.
I never use it so, when it rang, it was a surprise. But then, when I found out it was you, it almost made sense. You run the phone line, along with my Internet, and its how you contact me when you have questions.
“Is this Mr. or Mrs. Blue?” a sweet female voice rang out from the other end.
“No, this is Mr. Black, I am her significant other and the gentleman of the household, how can I help you?”
The woman on the other end balked. Since my wife and I never did the whole marriage ceremony thing, we have different last names. It’s never been a big deal for us, but I still get some amusement watching morons trip over it like it’s a great sin.
“Are you authorized on the account?” she asked.
“Yes, yes I am,” I answered honestly, thinking that, as usual, you simply needed information or it was a stupid survey.
“Then sir, I have a special offer for you,” she responded.
I knew then I had screwed up.
How NOT to Hold a Job Interview
Dear Unnamed Local Fake College,
It was a week ago today that I got the call. You had received my application for employment and wanted to see me for an interview.
“Great news!” I thought. I had been looking for some part time, evening work to supplement my income and your position was one of the few available.
“The interview will be at 6:30 on the 25th,” said the man on the other line, his deep voice making it seem more like a spy mission than a job interview.
Now I’ve been on dozens of job interviews, but none began like this. I’ve spent hours of my life scheduling these things but never have I been given a “take it or leave it” time and place. Yet, the date and time were good, it was a Wednesday, the wife gets home early, no scheduling problems. I could make it easily.
I accepted.
Little did I know that your interview was going to literally fuck me out of two hours of my life and that you would showcase a level of incompetence that is generally only reserved for people in Government here in New Orleans.
If you had thought about what you were doing for three seconds or given an ounce of care for the people you called in, you wouldn’t have pissed off myself and a dozen other people, most of them educators.
You screwed this one up and, because I’m such a nice, caring guy, I’ll tell you where you went wrong.
Death to the CD Key
Dear Game Developers,
There are only a few greater joys in my life than popping in an old favorite computer game and making it new again. Whether I’m enjoying a rousing round of Age of the Empires 2 or Max Payne, there’s a lot to be said about playing a (slightly) older computer game.
First, the games work, the first time, every time (unless it’s made by SEGA). There’s no worries about RAM requirements, bad performance or hangups. Your modern system can play these games flawlessly at the same time its downloading recipes from Argentina and cataloging your ten gigabyte porn collection.
Second, they’re still fun. If you enjoyed a game five years ago, you’ll probably enjoy it today. You can’t tell me that Half-Life 1 isn’t more fun than Doom 3 (of course, gluing your finger up your ass is more fun than the latter). Weaker graphics aside, everyone still gets giddy about the gameplay of older games, even if they won’t admit it.
Finally, they’re free or dirt cheap. If you don’t have them already, you can pick them up from the bargain bin in a flea market for a quarter and a can of Raid (I usually throw in deodorant to sweeten the deal). You don’t have to blow fifty bucks on a game that might not work or will probably suck. You can get a good, working game for a fraction of the cost.
So imagine my joy as I sit upon a literal mountain of old computer games. Classics from all genres and all walks of life. Now imagine my frustration since I can’t install half of them. Their CD keys have long since gone the way of the dodo and they are on their way to becoming Christmas tree decorations, and I don’t even celebrate Christmas.
The Gas-Guzzling Carpool Lane
Dear Environmentalists,
If there were ever a movement with its heart in the right place but a slew of half-cocked ideas, it would be yours. I agree that we should protect the earth, but I don’t think burning fossil fuels, throwing up tons of CO2 and creating a toxic sludge to protect a renewable resource and prevent biodegradable waste is all that bright.
But hey, recycle paper if you want to. It’s your right.
No, my question today revolves around yet another one of your mainstays, the HOV lane, AKA: The Carpool lane.
I have to wonder whether or not those of you behind this idea actually thought it all of the way through. Because, thanks to this invention. I am actually using twice the gas, sending up twice the CO2 and generally screwing the environment twice as bad
Don’t believe me, consider the following:
Water… Water… I Need Water.
Dear Sewage & Water Board,
As a long-time New Orleans resident, I’ve become sadly adapted to the results of political and civic incompetence. High crime, pothole-lined roads, malfunctioning stoplights, the usual. I realized some time ago that this city is run by the same 1000 monkey that, supposedly, can hammer out the works of Shakespeare if you leave them alone with typewriters.
But you, S&WB, have always been a particularly foul mark on the city. You’ve always been known for high rates, bad customer service and undrinkable water. It is no wonder that Kentwood bottles its water here, there are so many locals desperate for real water, they can make bank just reminding us what real H20 tastes like.
But today you broke new ground. Today you provided service so bad, so awful, that I actually WISHED I had access to your dirty-tasting water. That’s right, you disconnected my water. Why? Because of a stupid form.
No warning, No call. Not even a knock to let me know they’re turning it off. Just a dishwasher sounding like a cat had crawled in it.
So, if you have a moment, I’d like to tell my story and I hope you will listen to it and learn from it…
I Want the Wii I was Promised
Dear Video Game Developers,
I read in a recent article that many of you have finally woken up to the popularity of the Wii and decided to shift resources to developing for it.
I think that’s great news. Sure, it took you the better part of a year to catch on but, hey, that’s still faster than FEMA right?
But since you’re throwing all of those millions of dollars toward the Wii, I’d like to make a very small, humble request/recommendation on how to spend it: I want the Wii experience I was promised when I bought it.
To prove my point, let me tell you a story.
My Life Without Flash Player
Dear Adobe,
It seems that your Flash Player for Intel-based Macs has a pretty serious problem. Whenever I first start out using it, things start off fine but, as time wears on, my browser moves slower and slower until it eventually hangs altogether, destroying whatever I was working on at the time.
I can confirm definitively that the problem is with your player. How? I tested it on nine, count them nine, different browsers (Safari, Webkit, Firefox, Flock, OmniWeb, Shiira, Opera, Netscape and Camino). For anyone who is counting, that is four Webkit and four Gecko browsers along with Opera.
Every single one of those browsers experienced the exact same problem. They’d run great for a while, slow after visiting a few sites with Flash and then die an undignified death.
The only thing that made the problem go away was uninstalling Flash player or disabling the plugin, two things I had been hesitant to do.
Worse still, your own support section makes me pine for Microsoft support. Your guide on troubleshooting Flash Player on Intel Macs has only one suggestion, running the browser in Rosetta and using Flash 8. Great, rather than you fixing your stupid plugin, I have to slow my entire browser to a painful crawl and use an outdated version of Flash.
No thanks.
Here’s to John Lovitz, My New Hero
Dear John Lovitz,
You are my new hero. If you have a fan club, I want to become a member, scratch that, I want two memberships and I’ll pay for them both.
When I read on Digg yesterday that you used Andy Dick’s head to polish a comedy club bar, my spirits actually lifted. I’m not a violent person, I don’t believe in using force against your fellow man, but this is not a fellow man we’re talking about, it’s Andy Dick.
What you did wasn’t just a matter of standing up for your departed friend Phil Hartman, you stood up for every decent human being in the world that has been tormented by his antics over the years. Between licking Carrie Fisher’s face, peeing in front of a reporter, Groping Ivanka Trump and doing more drink and drugs than I care to think about, Andy has exhibited every deplorable human behavior imaginable (and a few that weren’t imaginable before he did them) and has faced no ill consequences for them.
That is, until you, Mr. Lovitz, stepped in.
