Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Vent Thread

Hope you complained to the company, Aurora!! That's totally out of order!

LabRat

I know I'm late to the party, but I'll add my little whine and cheese.

Hate, hate, hate HATE line jumpers (or queue jumpers for you UK folk).

The other day I was waiting in a rather long line to pay a toll on the highway (don't get me started on highway tolls). I was about four cars from the pay booth when some yahoo comes zooming up between my line and the line just to my left, only to cut in my line when the big concrete barrier gave him no other choice. The car in front of me let him get in front of her. I don't know if I could have gathered my outraged wits enough to stop him but I would have let him hit my car before getting in front of me.

Or yesterday, when I was waiting patiently in the marked line for pick-up at the pharmacy. There were two clerks helping customers, but rather than line up behind a specific clerk, there was one line that fed to the next available clerk. I was next. This woman in one of those electric-motorized chairs came zipping up next to me, clearly expecting to use the clerk in front of her despite the fact that I'd been waiting patiently for 10 minutes to be helped. Thankfully the clerk she was waiting for called me to the counter when her customer finished up.

It's a crowded world. Those out there who think they are oh-so-much more important than the rest of us and therefore shouldn't have to wait can kiss my grits!

Lynn

Yep, Lynn, and the doubly-annoying thing about your second example is that the woman in the electric buggy thing had staked out the moral high ground - ie, she was disabled - and therefore you couldn't complain because then you'd be perceived as unsympathetic towards the disabled.

I had a similar thing at the airport over Christmas. I was standing in the queue to check in, and in waltzes a guy with a woman in tow who's on crutches. He goes straight to the check-in counter, jumping ahead of me and the queue behind me and throwing an apologetic 'sorry-but-as-you-can-see-she's-disabled' glance at us. Well, there were plenty of seats around, so the woman on crutches could have sat down while he checked in, for heaven's sake! But we all smiled understandingly and let him queue-jump.

Yvonne

I'm back - must be feeling grumpy today.

Clothing gripes:

1. Winter coats that are so close-fitting you can't get them on over your not-*that*-thick woollen sweater. I mean, what's the point of a winter coat that doesn't work with other winter clothes?

2. Winter dresses made out of thin, summer weight materials *and* with short sleeves. Just because the dress is in a 'winter' colour does *not* make it a winter dress, oh stupid fashion designer!

3. Cardigans, sweaters and fleeces with sleeves so tight you can't wear anything underneath them. And no, the rest of me might be a bit lumpy, but my arms are slim, so it's not the wearer that's at fault. Oh, and if you, by happy chance, *can* wear anything underneath, they're still so tight that the underneath garment rides all the way up your arms into tight bunches of material which you then have to pull back down by squeezing your hand up the tight sleeve of the cardigan and pulling. Then that pulls the neck out of shape so *then* you have to do a desperate wiggling motion to get everything back in place.

I'm sure there's more but I seem to have run out of grumpiness for now.

Yvonne

My turn. Banks who think you are so stupid that when you phone them up to tell them the cheque they were supposed to send at the beginning of December hasn't arrived and they promise to cancel it and send another and then you get the original cheque on Friday dated 2nd December but posted on the 18th! you won't realise that they never sent it out in the first place and it didn't go missing in the mail after all! Gits.

And then you get the second, replacement cheque the day after you put the original in the bank and you realise the original will bounce because it was cancelled before they sent it to you....

<breathe deep, breathe deep...>

Ah well, at least the dang thing has finally arrived, putting an end to a ten year (yup, you heard right) saga of trying to close down an account and get the balance paid and I NO LONGER HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT. )

LabRat

People (more specifically, students) who send me an email and expect a reply within two hours--especially if they sent the email at two in the morning. I check my email at the very least once a day during the semester. Sometimes a lot more times than that. And I answer emails promptly.

But you need to give me at least 24 hours. We do have lives, and are not sitting around just waiting to answer your emails.

And for that matter, people who think they are entitled to things they haven't worked for. If you didn't bother doing your homework all semester and couldn't get up to come to class, WHY do you expect me to work with you, even bend the rules, so you can still pass my class? Just because you want it doesn't mean you should get it.

My turn. I just lost one of my jobs. I call it surprise layoffs today, but I should have seen it coming. It's retail and our last sale just ended so they cut the associate list in half again. I didn't make the cut. I'm wallowing in bed into a pint of Haagan Daz, but my best friend is going to force me to go out with them and have fun tonight. I still have my other job, but it'll probably end in March. I'm just doing some free lance design work for a university in town while they're short-staffed.

Whine.

Fellow teachers should be able to identify with my latest complaint:
My GATE students have (theoretically) been working on their History Day projects since last July. I have given them pages of notes worth of feedback to students who turned pieces of the project in according to the week by week deadlines they had. I graded all of the projects at the end of November according to the national competition rubric and warned them that if they didn't improve their projects, then that was the grade they'd earn. Almost none of my students made any significant changes. Surprise, surprise, I gave them the grade they had earned. I just got an angry (all caps) e-mail from a parent who complained bitterly that she didn't agree with the B that I gave her daughter. "She gave A+ effort. You should reward her for her effort." Ummm, no! The girl should have taken the page of notes and the month of time to do what I told her to do. Do parents really believe that threatening to go to the principal and superintendent over a B on one assignment will get them anywhere?

Oh boy can I relate. I teach college level Art History, Art Ed and Computer Graphics. 2/3rds of the students (and that is being generous) are there because their parents insist they go to college. They don't hand in homework on time, if they hand it in at all. They exceed the absenses for the class or arive late and leave early. They don't put in the lab time required out side of the class. Of course, these are the students that complain most about their grade and how unfare I am or how tough I am. Then the college asks these same students to rate their Professor. Why doesn't the college ask the Professor to rate the student in the same fashon. Sure we give them a grade and keep track of absenses but unless they are in fear of failing reports do not go out. I think if you are going to give an irrisponsible student the right to bad mouth a professor then the professor should be able to defend their actions. Thank God most of the reports I get are mostly good or I would be out of a job.

Punctuality. Currently I'm sitting around in my office getting paid to do nothing. And no, I'm not complaining about the paying part. :p But if my boss tells me specifically to show up at 9 and she's not there...well, crap. I can't do anything until I receive my assignments.

Hey, my pet peeve is going back to a McDonald's and seeing everything wrong. I can't go in and just be a customer. LOL. Ah, it's been over a year now and I don't regret leaving the cult. I'm still branded mind you (burns LOL).

Oh Pam, where I am there is only face to face drive thru. I can't do the speaker ones anyways. I am so deaf!

Were I am (EDIT - was!) they took credit cards for a long time. The reason they stopped taking credit cards in my area (western cda) was... too many people were having fraudlent charges and so on. The credit card people too decided something too. The cards were a pain to deal with too!!!!! It slowed down service. We found our sevice on average decreased after the cards were not accepted. Mind you, our location ROCKED! yeah! LOL

One of our managers who was working towards their BSC in psch did this whole experiment and studied all the variables and found how the credit cards were slowing us down. It was fun and he got to watch us. Mind you he had to pick a project and he created this one (you have to do stuff like that when you want to 'develope' at McDs). We knew they were getting taken away and he just wanted to see if it would be a perk OR NOT for us.

Also another reason they stopped accepting, too many people were coming back saying "I didn't authorize this", but they did. One lady did that to us a lot. You don't use debit?
I think they started accepting them again here a month or two ago...

I could alwasy get the card to work. Did they do all the magic tricks? LOL. In one shift coffee spilt on the debit machine three times. I had many people get mad at me b/c our machine wouldn't work. Half the time it was because their cards were old. LOL. But that's just normal.

- try the burger wrapper around the card
- try a napkin
- get them to get the cleaner wipes for the card and/or the machine
- swipe at varying speeds
- unplug the cords at the back of the machine and try again.

These little kids there now a days are just to afraid to play with the machine. I like to, it's a challenge during a boring work day. I can do the above in just a minute or two, but man some workers are ...slow in every which way!

Oh and the computers bite. I had no problem. When they go down - just do it old school style! LOL. I love doing it that way.

There are too many better jobs out there and the better employees no longer work at McDonald's and just go elsewhere. Before it was so hard to get a job there b/c their criteria was high, but by the mid to late 90s it became easier b/c the eligable workforce was looking elsewhere.

Olive Garden -- yeah, why do people get surprised that things can take a while if it is busy! Gee wiz. I hate it when people don't read a menu period. I was with one girl and she just asked, "so what do you have" to the waitress. Um duh, read the menu!

I hate icky gross menus. I found out later thats why she just asks and gets what the waitress says is their so-called favourite.
I say just go wash your hands afterwards.

Todays pet peeves
Pens that explode. They should ban that.
Stupid people in classrooms. Just be quiet and listen and read what the prof gives you and don't ask dumb questions equivalent to what day of the week is it.
Dumb people that just dump their garbage while walking around and not hold on to it until they see a bin.
The weather we have been having. Hello it is suppose to be -10 to -20 here with the odd -30. It's been spring all the way through so far!!! UGH!! I want to go skiing and not end up in a muddy puddle. I want to go skating onthe river!!! The world is coming to an end.

Me again.

My digital TV company and their stupid new 'wonderful' Teleport service. Every time I see an ad for this they tell us it's 'TV you control' and it gives you access to 'a vast library of programmes you can watch any time you like.'

Har!

First of all, where's the control? You're at the mercy of some idiot back at the office and which programmes they decide to upload to the service out of Telewest's archives. And I've concluded that whoever it is they've hired to do it is straight off the bus from the local insane asylum.

Teleport Replay - a selection of programmes from the previous day, in case you missed them. There are about 15 per day on average. Vast library, huh?

Then there's the other section to the service, which are programmes from the archives. About 40 or so so far. Yeah, vast library, right.

Here's where the idiot really gets into his/her stride. Programmes are uploaded one day, then totally vanish three days later (they're supposed to be up for a couple of months before moving to the Last Chance To Watch section and then finally being deleted). Series are uploaded in haphazard order, with episodes missing. I spent two hours the other day watching a Cracker story in two parts - only to discover at the end of part two that it was actually a three part story...and part three was nowhere to be found. Three days later the entire list of Cracker episodes vanished.

Like everything about Telewest it's a lot of hooha and not much substance.

LabRat

Interesting, Roo -- I wouldn't have thought that cards were slowing things down. From my end (when the machines work) it's just as fast if not faster. Though I used to do credit card sales (back in prehistoric times of the late 80s to Telewest. I hate being at the mercy of someone else's idea of the things I ought to watch. We got a Tivo for Christmas, which is cool, but not quite as cool as I thought it'd be. I mostly wanted it because of Sci-Fi Fridays, where they show Stargate and Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica back-to-back. Meanwhile Monk is on USA, and we'd like to watch that, too. But you can't record two things at once. And the first time we tried it, it recorded Stargate and BG, but *not* Atlantis. Stupid thing thought that its schedule conflicted with Stargate, and therefore it dropped Atlantis. And while it's played again later that night (this is cable, after all) apparently the nifty Season Pass feature doesn't understand when you want to capture the second showing of something. We'll work around it -- you can set it to manually record -- but it was annoying to discover. Still a fun toy, though.

PJ

Okay, there I can't argue. We were getting something that was on the top shelf once and there was no one around to get it for us, so we just used the ladder there and got it ourselves. If the manager had seen us, he probably would have had a cow!

And my own vent...

Customers who don't feel like doing their own work. 90% of the questions I answer all day could have been answered by looking in our catalog or on our website! It's just easier to pick up that phone and get someone else to do it for you!

Oh, and when someone asks a question...and I answer it...and they don't like the answer so they say, "really?" or "you're kidding." As if I'd make things up just to see if they're paying attention!!

AND my two and a half hour round-trip commute doesn't help my outlook much either!

I suspect it won't make you feel any better, Pam, but you're not alone.
Tivo apparently isn't recording Atlantis because of some glitch that's mixed up the dates.

LabRat

Oh Labby, same thing goes on here. With Rogers Digital Cable, we're supposed to get a service called RogersOnDemand, which is the same thing - can select programs to watch.

Trouble is all the shows they have on the selection menus are really old/bad movies and documentaries I don't want to watch.

If you won't put *good* programming on it, what's the freaking point of the service?? :p

Julie

Yeah, the Teleport Replay section is pretty naff. It's mostly the dross, like dumbed down documentaries/reality shows. And the news! I'm still trying to figure out who the heck would want to watch the previous night's news again.

The other thing that irks me with the entire service is that you can't record what's uploaded. This kills me. Why can I record series two of Waking the Dead if they showed it on their UK Drama channel, but I can't record it from Teleport? This makes no sense to me. ) and in the middle of S9 of SG1. I was able to circumvent it by switching my recording of Voyager from the 4pm run to the midnight run. But nothing I can do to avoid it with SG1. Which totally sucks.

Then, they added insult to injury this week by adding in a logo for Over There in the middle of BSG! The swines! How can they decimate good programming this way? It's sacrilege.

LabRat

So it's not an overlap problem? Thanks, Labby, that's helpful I've reprogrammed my Season Pass to get *all* showings, including duplicates, so that also scheduled the midnight replay of Atlantis. So if it skips the first one, for overlap, at least it'll get the second. I think. Guess we'll find out tonight

The irony, of course, is that I don't usually find Atlantis that interesting but every once in a while they have something good.

PJ

In my cubefarm at work -- I am sick of being in a cube next to a person who loves to fart and cut their nails.

Joy.

UPDATE -- (feb 9). I get to move my cube b/c I will be doing a different job w/i my dept! YAY. No more Mr. FartClip