Monday, December 31, 2007

Customer Service Loop

Last post I shared with everyone my new, warm, cozy sleep socks. Now they are warm, cozy, smelly sleep socks! Woohoo! They are broken in!

Well, another one of my wonderful gifts from my eldest sister, I'll call her Hotel-Sis. That has nothing to do with her job or anything. Just a reference to her initials. Moving on...

Hotel-Sis got me a Flip Camcorder. Cool, huh? It really is! Easy to use, so far. The "so far" hopefully captured your attention. I plugged The Flip into my conputer to download my videos...mostly random stuff just playing around, but some stuff I intended to use, and...nothing. Huh. Well, something was supposed to happen. Hotel-Sis had warned me that apparently they made so many of these so quickly, being the "hot, new thing", that it wasn't uncommon for Flips to turn up with errors in their programming. Well, I went to the Flip website to see what it had to say, and tried a couple of things to no avail, and sent the problem in to Customer Service. Follow me into the dreaded CSL...Customer Service Loop.

Loop 1: Request for information about me and the unit. Understandable. Told to just send in the Flip, they'll reprogram and try and save my videos. Not happy, but fair enough.

Purgatory: 24 Hours later. No response. Send email asking if they got my information, etc.

Loop 2: Before proceding, they want to try one more troubleshooting step. Fair enough...but part of what they wanted me to do, I didn't understand how I was supposed to do it. So I asked for clarification.

Purgatory .5: Received email in response to my email asking if they have received the information and am asked to re-forward the information.

Return to Loop 1: I re-sent the information. No clarification for my previous question.

Loop 1.5: Given information about sending the camera in including sending the exact same information I've provided via email 3 times already.

It's enough to drive someone insane. Cartainly nauseous. So I'll send in my Flip hoping they'll save my videos, and I might be able to do some video stuff here. But keep your vomit bags handy...just in case.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

The Warmth of Christmas

So, how was everyone's Christmas? Good, I hope. Christmas went by in the Asshole household without a hitch. Giant Microbes were a big hit this year as Delta-Boy got Tuberculosis, Zebra-Girl got Flesh-Eating Virus, Sierra-Girl got the Black Death, Bravo-Boy got Athelete's Foot, and Yankee-Boy got the Ebola Virus. Mamahole got the Common Cold, and I got myself a House Fly, a carrier of microbes...


One of my big gifts, and some of you may laugh, but one of my big gifts this year were sleep socks. Socks not worn because you are walking out in public in shoes, but thick, warm socks worn because you are at home, you're comfortable, but if not for those sleep socks, your toes would be cold. Now to make sure you understand why the sleep socks were one of the big hits of my Christmas, you have to understand how my feetses got around before Christmas morning...
Man, those are some cold, unhappy feet. Notice how my new House Fly loves my feet. It's not that they are stank feet. Eau Contraire! It's the holey socks.


Oh! Holey Socks
The Toes are Gently Peeking
It is the holes in our poor, smelly socks....


So my most wonderful wife got me new Sleep Socks for my poor toesies...

Nothing says Christmas like warm, flyless toes. Merry Christmas everybody!

Monday, December 24, 2007

Enough With Political Childishness

I sat down this morning with my newspaper hoping not to find too much death and misery and I was greeted with something else disturbing of a different nature. Professional childishness.

The headline: "Romney targets Huckabee"

Doing a Google search of the phrase "Romney targets Huckabee" and you get 2,000 plus pages. That's with the quotes. My question is...why?

I'd go off on a whole rant about Romney and how he can't seem to convince everyone he can be president without demeaning his opponents abilities and characters...but it's not just Romney.

Another headline: "Obama fires back at Bill Clinton"

Why?

Ok, that question is brought from two thoughts. Not just "Why can't a politician just say why he's the best choice for president without saying why the other person isn't the best choice?" Also, why are we even talking to Bill? If I was Obama, the only "firing back" I would do would be to say, "I thought your wife was running for president, not you."

When Dubya ran, his father didn't get this much attention. No wives get so much press time.

Anyway, that's not my focus here...Why do Americans want to see their prospective leaders fighting like middle schoolers? In a classroom, if students were blaming, finger pointing, insulting, and ridiculing each other, like our politicians do, the students would get in trouble. They'd be told to knock it off.

So I leave you with two questions to ponder:

1) Why do we hold our elementary and middle school aged children to higher standards of behavior than our political leaders?

2) Where's the politician with the strength of character to say, "I will not bother slandering my opponent's name. I will not stoop to mudslinging. I will explain why I should be president, and refute my opponents' disparaging remarks, and that it all." Where is that politician? Because that politician I would be happy to vote for, regardless of party.