Urge to kill rising. I find the reaction here far more threatening than both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street combined.

Seriously, just read through a bunch of these. It paints an ugly picture.

If you really need access to blacked out Wikipedia pages, Google’s cache feature works wonders.

All in all it kicks ass.

This week covered Grunge – trying to see where it fit and talking to the artists to see where they felt they fit into the big picture of heavy music and metal. Which leads me to my point:

Back in the day, ‘typical’ grunge folk (the artists, fans, bands – the scene) struck me exactly as the stereotype portrayed them…as whiny, mopey, pretentious faux-intellectuals who took themselves too seriously and were too cool for anything.

Upon seeing these people 20 years later as full grown adults in their 40′s and pushing 50, I was surprised (or maybe I wasn’t) to find that nothing has changed. Except it’s even more eye-roll worthy and rage inducing to see them still acting like that.

I can sum up most of the interviews like this, “Heavy music before us sucked. Heavy music since us is a rip off…and sucks. You’re stupid if you like anything else. Music reached perfection back in my day when I was coming of age and I don’t realize that everyone thinks that about the music they grew up with. I’ve become exactly the walking stereotype I claim to stand against. Get off my lawn.”

These people were lame 20 years ago and they’re still lame today. Not enough of them killed themsleves. But there is hope – many of the bands are getting back together so there just might be some additional overdoses and shotgun blasts in their futures. We can hope, right?

—

And Geico brought back the stupid-ass wee-wee-wee pig for a new commercial and I hope whoever made that decision goes on tour with one of the fucking reunited grunge bands.

They ask these ladies what the numbers from the supposedly missing precinct are. If you factor in those numbers as the missing precinct, it puts Romney in the lead by 14. However, no one on CNN is quick enough to do the math (I’m good like that) and they state that Romney would win by “somewhere around 20 votes” – they then proceed to ask a bunch of questions to the two old ladies about county-wide numbers and different precincts and such. After a few minutes of confusing nonsense they cut to a reporter in Iowa saying she got word that people in Romney’s camp are now saying they’ve been told they won by 14 votes.

Cut back to the CNN studio where they’re treating this like new news and saying that while it doesn’t jive exactly with their numbers, it confirms their lead that Romney wins with the last precinct counted.

It seems so obvious that this is a case of circular reporting. They get these ladies on the phone and do some half-assed reporting. Someone tuned in to CNN gets word to the Romney camp and they start murmuring that CNN has info that, if correct, says they win by 14 and then in turn, CNN then reports that the Romney camp says they think they’ve won by 14.

This is why I don’t bother. At least Fox News is hilariously entertaining in their incompetence…as opposed to frustratingly so.

I have a few bills that have ridiculous fees attached. I’ll spare the complete list and just use this as an excuse for more Waste Management bashing.

Verizon wanted to charge people a $2 ‘convenience fee’ for paying their bills online.

Waste Management includes a $4 ‘administrative fee’ on each bill which I find really interesting as we’re paperless and I pay online. They waive that fee if you sign up for automatic payments. (which is exactly what Verizon wanted people to do – not so coincidentally)

I dunno. Of course charges like this are stupid, but it sure looks like this is the next wave. Just like these businesses don’t want the expense and hassle of sending a physical bill, they don’t want the hassle of physically processing payments and, more importantly, not getting payments. They want to take the money automatically. Seems like the fee acts as a sort of insurance against non-payment.

Like I said, I already have a few monthly bills that follow similar protocol and Waste Management is charging twice the ‘outrageous’ amount Verizon wanted.

Is it stupid? Yes. So get used to it.

I could go one with examples and examples of thing just in the past year, but I’m going to go with the just one that broke the camel’s back and compelled me to write this. It serves as a perfect example of thew ‘not the end of the world” but ‘not insignificant’ shit we run into where the response when questioning it is pretty much little more than a grumbled, “Sorry.”

A few months back (the first day of school to be exact) some asshole old dude pulled out into my path and I tagged him and fuckered up the Camaro’s rear bumper a little. Mostly cosmetic, but the insurance guy was cool and hooked me up.

We figured we’d just go back to the Chevy dealer to have the work done. Due to the hail storms we saw over the summer, a lot of cars had a lot of body damge and they were super backed-up. We were ok with that and made an appointment for December 12.

Well, December 12th rolled around this past Monday and we were there bright and early dropping off the car. We asked how long the work would take and were told best case was it’d be done by end of day on Tuesday the 13th and to call and see where they were. Cool.

So we heard nothing all day Tuesday and figured we wouldn’t push, it probably took a little longer. On the 14th (Wednesday) right around noon my wife called to see what the staus was. She was put on hold. About five or six minutes later a second person picked up the phone and asked how he could help her. She explained everything again and was put on hold a second time. Roughly five more minutes pass and a thrid guy picks up the phone and asks what she was calling about. This guy didn’t bother putting her on hold he just laid the phone down. You could hear people talking in the background, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. A few minutes pass and the third guy gets back on and says the bumper just came in today. Best case scenario is that it’s finished by end of day Friday.

Wait! What the fuck. There’s so much wrong with this.

1. Why didn’t they order the bumper ahead of time?
2. Why didn’t they tell us they still had to order the bumper when we dropper the car off and have us drop it off when the bumper came?
3. Assuming neither of those, why didn’t they call us to let us know what was going on?

So my wife gives him a little shit and he pretty much mumbles, “Sorry” and pushes her off the phone.

At what point is something a fuck up and a case of shit happens and at what point has the business fucked up and the customer deserves to have it made right in some way? I don’t know where that line really sits, but it seems to be shifting more and more towards, “Too fucking bad, I fucked up. Get over it.” with every passing day.

What’s worse is that we’re finding if you try to take it higher, often those people are unreachable or just don’t care as muchas the lower-level people. And if you try to fight back via customer satisfaction surveys – well, those seem to be about as biased as anything. Surveys all seem to be worded in a way that doesn’t hit the issues. I suspect it’s stacking the deck in order to sell your “record-high customer service scores” to people.

I just see it happening too much to be coincidence. No one cares and nothing seems to matter much anymore. We live in a time where “Yup. I’m an asshole.” seems to be a valid apology.

I’m getting real close to making “knocking your teeth down your throat” the valid response to such apologies.

Then the throwback “Where’s The Beef” ads started running and the fuckers changed the burgers.

They suck. It’s some kind of butter flavored shit. My burger shouldn’t taste like butter…ever.

Fuck you, Wendy. Dave Thomas would be ashamed, you filthy pigtailed whore.

I used to really like Wendy’s. Now I have no idea when (or why) I’ll ever go back.

“Now, it’s a simple theory,” said Obama. “And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.

Fuck Obama.

Billionaires with 1% tax rates

“A quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1%,” Obama said in a speech in Kansas.

Here are some of the facts behind the claim: In 2006 roughly 25% of those with adjusted gross incomes over $1 million paid a smaller portion of their income in federal taxes — income, payroll and corporate — than 10% of those with AGIs below $100,000, according to a recent study from the Congressional Research Service.

Did I mention, Fuck Obama?

Does ‘Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer’ Promote Bullying?

Dr. Paul Friday, head of Shadyside Psychological Services, has heard the conclusions of Long Island University Professor George Giuliani’s that the 1964 film about Rudolph’s tribulations amounts to classic bullying.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

We really need to get over this whole bullying bullshit. Don’t even get me started. Learn to deal, pussies.

I cannot express how much I love this. LOVE!

I think he’s dead on. In fact it’s scary how much he took directly from my head…almost word for word. I’d also add that the same generation also grew up in uncommonly prosperous economic times as well – their entire youth as a generation was about unrealistic expectations top to bottom.

Ass douches!

I swung by Tyler’s blog and was led to this article about Coldplay not letting their newest album be played on the various streaming sources.

It’s all fine and dandy until the last few paragraphs:

Coldplay’s handlers are telling some of the services they won’t stream because they believe “Mylo Xyloto” should be heard as one cohesive work, according to one industry insider with knowledge of the discussions. They don’t want the album to be broken up into singles.

If that’s true, how often have we heard this before? Acts such as AC/DC, Kid Rock, and Pink Floyd have all eschewed digital sales at one point and claimed that their music should be heard in its entirety.

That’s fine, but forcing people to buy music that they may not want is taking us back to the days of the CD, when fans people required to plunk down $15 for one or two good songs. It was anti-consumer then and it is anti-consumer now.

Wow. What a load of shit written by someone who needs punched in the face. Repeatedly. By musicians.

Wouldn’t that be like me going to a world-class chef and complaining that I have to pay for all 7 courses when I really only want the appetizer and desert? Damn that chef for being anti-consumer. Or complaining that I can’t just rip a few pages out of a book because those are the chapters I’m interested in? Stupid authors, all smug on their anti-consumer high horses. Those heartless fuckers! Or bitching that you have to buy the whole sculpture when you just want the bust for your mantle?

It is what it is. Who the hell are you to dissect an artist’s work because you want to chop it up like some piecemeal junk for your own parasitic means? They’re not selling you songs, dipshit, they’re selling you an album. If you want to buy songs, you need to look elsewhere. And then to turn it around and call the practice anti-consumer? Holy. Fucking. Shit.

And then the comments…sigh. The devaluing of music is such a shame.

I really like to think people would have enough respect for the artists and the music they love to support the cause, but because it’s not presented how they want it, they’ll bitch, moan and take it for free. So do we expect the artist to whore the process to turn a buck because the consumer has become a douchebag? If so, what does that say about the product?

People say they quit buying because so much was crap. I say so much is crap because people quit buying.

We came home on Sunday to find the DVR telling us we had nothing recorded. Odd, since we had a shitload recorded. We tend to record, save and watch in chunks and there was stuff as old as 4 or 5 months on there waiting to be viewed. Even weirder was that it was telling me that 100% of the space was available, but indicated that there was about 17 hours of HD space. That’s weird because the DVR held about 100 hours of HD and 17 hours is about what was left with what we had sitting on the box.

Called AT&T. Essentially, the hard drive went. They sent out a replacement. It came yesterday. It’s a much newer model, has more capacity and seems to handle the ‘whole house DVR’ thing much better than the old box – which would lag and get out of sync. So that’s a nice upside to losing all the shit we had recorded.

My wife took the opportunity to try to weasel some compensation for our loss – it was a longshot, but you’d be amazed at what she has to give at the hotel sometimes, so it was worth a try.

This is where AT&T customer support failed in a major way. After the tech couldn’t help she was given to a supervisor who seemed to be just as unempowered. When my wife asked to go over her head to an actual manager, she was told no managers were in (it was Sunday evening) and to call back tomorrow and she could speak to the manager. The next day, the runaround got even greater with each person on the phone just passing the call along to someone else who wasn’t empowered to try to satisfy our complaint. It finally ended at the supervisor level again where this one offered the most compensation (still not even closer to what felt like an honest effort to appease an angry customer), informed us that the supervisor the night before was full of shit and pretty much lied to get my wife off the phone and pass the problem to the people on the next day and that no one above her on the totem pole would ever talk to a customer because it’s not in their job description.

Pretty much, if a level 1 tech can’t solve your issue to your satisfaction then it gets passed to a ‘supervisor’ and after that…well, sorry.

She suggested we try the AT&T site to contact someone higher up, but you can’t seem to. It just pushes you to the same phone numbers and the same unempowered employees.

Flat out. AT&T doesn’t want to hear it.

That was a little disappointing. Seems to be getting that way more and more. The one that always irks me is the customer survey that only asked certain questions or asks them in a certain way so that you really can’t express displeasure. I can’t think of an example offhand, but too many times when I have an issue with something and try to fill out the customer survey I can’t help but think they’re worded in a way to elicit the ‘correct’ response and keep satisfaction scores high.

But the new DVR is pretty kick ass.

That’s all.

On Friday I woke up feeling fine. By late afternoon, I knew something was brewing and by the time I went to bed, I was totally blech. Yesterday sucked. We had a football game and then after game tailgate party for the team. Nothing like feeling crappyand sitting in the sun all day. Today I woke up feeling like I got hit by a small truck. I’m lethargic and don’t feel like doing shit.

On top of all of that, there’s an inherent taboo in being sick when it’s sunny and 70 out. You’re only supposed to be sick when it’s shitty outside too. This warm weather sickness goes against everything that makes sense. Colds and flus should be reserved for November through March.

So this year, they’re telling us that if we plan on standing out front and picking up our kids that we instead have to go to the gymnasium, wait for our child and sign them out. But if we pull along the side of the school and stay in our car the kids can just come out. Also if your kid is a walker and walks home, they can just leave.

How little sense does this make?

My kid is free to roam whereever he wants as long as I’m not present. As soon as I show up, there’s special areas and procedures. Weird. Not sure why he can walk to the side of the building and get in any old car or walk home and run into God-knows-what, but he can’t walk out and meet me if I’m also out of the car and just standing there.