UnleashYourAnger.com

Why, why, why in the world do people on airplanes realize that those “things” they put their hands on are something people are sitting on?!  Yes, I am talking about people who yank the seat in front of them to get up, people who walk down the aisle grabbing the top of seats, and people who lean on the tables that are attached to the seats in front of them. 

I am thinking they do it, because they don’t realize how annoying it is to others.  Please, please, please be a little more aware of your surroundings!! 

As all of you from snowy regions agree, it is important for us to be on a look out for morning snow storms.  We need to look out for school cancellations, road/commute conditions, flight schedule changes, etc.  So, naturally, we all turn to local news for weather updates.

I watch the Fox News at 10 (mostly, because I don’t want to wait until 11).  It angers me to no end that they move “weather coverage” towards the end of the show, just to keep the viewers stuck on their channel.  They also keep people guessing and on their toes, by pretending to start the weather coverage at the beginning of the show, before every commercial, and in between stories.

I know this isn’t a new trick employed by the news station to use the best story to lure viewers.  However, it is too blatantly obvious when it comes to weather related stories.  We are trying to get to bed early to prepare for them storm!  Why do you have to push the weather to the end?!

We all don’t like people who write ALL CAPS. Luckily, internet
”netiquette” has spread wide enough that we don’t see these folks so often.  However, I would like to rant about the CAPS haters.  I am talking about people who are so insecure and sensitive about CAPS that they feel people are YELLING and SHOUTING at them whenever they see it.

The other day at work, there was an email thread about discussing the next meeting date.  There were some back-and-forth and some mistaken labeling of the days (i.e. someone saying 2/27 was Tuesday, rather than Wednesday).  There was finally a day we could all agree on, so I wrote back, “OK, we will have the meeting on THURSDAY at 2:30PM.” 

Then, one of the recipients writes back, “WHICH THURSDAY DID YOU WANT TO HAVE THE MEETING??  We all read English, there is no need for the caps.”  Upon approaching him and inquiring, he replies, “You did offend me with your caps.  I don't think it was necessary to SCREAM the date.”

First of all, this has nothing to do with being able to read English. Secondly, isn’t it obvious that the caps in this case was meant for clarification instead of screaming?  Some people are just too damn sensitive about netiquette these days, they take things way too literally.  I know it is hard to pickup insinuation from emails and these rules help, but this is getting ridiculous.  In fact, isn’t using the caps the grammatically correct way to add emphasis?

A week later, I saw this same dude in middle of a busy street pounding, with a golf club, the heck out of a store sign.  The sign read, “BURGER KING - DRIVE THRU”.   It’s a crazy world out there.  Be good, everyone.

When I'm at work: I hate it when someone forwards me a huge email thread with 10 or 15 previous emails arguing back and forth between 5 different groups, and simply says "Hey can you help out here?" or something. Forcing me to read the entire thing from the bottom up and figure out what the hell is going on with it.  I'm not an email reading machine and frankly I have better things to do.

Instead, how about you give me a quick 2 sentence summary of what the problem is and how you think I might be able to help?  Your 1 minute spent doing that would save me 10 or 15 minutes of reading and figuring out.  I might not even be able to help, so then it's just a big waste of time for everybody involved.

In the old days before email this is how things would get done: you'd phone me, or visit my office, and explain the problem to me, and I'd probably be able to instantly offer a solution.  Nowadays half the people I work with are too lazy to do this and so they just shove the problem along to the next guy.  Where's the professionalism?

This is just enough to make me sick.

The MBTA now admits that they've been secretly cutting bus service back without publishing it in their timetables.  Lying to us.  

All the while, they've been raising fares.  This can only mean massive corruption within the organization.  Someone is skimming off the top and getting rich(er) off of us somewhere.

My solution?  Dissolve the whole organization.  Fire them all.  The entire management.  Start over. 

Holy cr@p, Boston.   I've hit at least four bone-jarring car-slamming potholes in the last two days.  Luckily no major tire or rim damage yet but each one feels like my car is going to crack in half...  You know what I mean.  Must just be a really rough winter for them.

On the plus side, I'm also noticing a lot of the giant potholes getting fixed, so I guess crews are out there doing their job.  Must just be a lot to keep up with.

Ok, this seems like a little thing but why do they put holes in bagels?  I'm sure it's just tradition, but maybe it's time for the bagel to evolve a little bit. 

You see, when starvinmarvin is making his breakfast in the morning, the one thing that bugs him more than anything else is having to wipe a big glob of molten butter off of the countertop after it dripped through the hole in the bagel. As I'm sure everyone on this site knows well, buttering/cream cheesing/jamming/whatevering an item with a hole in it, such as a bagel, is like 100 times harder than buttering a nice, flat, solid piece of bread.  It takes quite a lot of control and knife technique to avoid the hole.

When you think about it, it's a pretty stupid design.  What was the original bagel inventor thinking putting a hole in a vessel designed for holding gooey substances, and why on earth has no one thought to improve on the design?

Do NOT use the car wash by McDonalds on Route 28.  My friend, Tom, took his car there and his car was damaged as a result.

While docking his car with the moving plate, the attendant kept telling him to keep pulling forward.  Tom felt uncomfortable doing this since he could feel the car locked in, but he kept being instructed to move further in.  After the wash, he noticed that his tire was slashed by the moving parts.  I believe both the tire and the rim were damaged and he had to replace both of them.

Tom obviously spoke with the manager, but the store gave him a lot of trouble.  Only after a few days and several angry calls, they finally agreed to pay for the damage.  (I am not sure if Tom's being a lawyer helped the situation, as I am not sure if he ever pulled out the L card.)

In summary, I do not recommend bringing your car to that car wash.

As Peter Griffin would say, you know what grinds my gears?

Verizon Wireless' brilliant reliability and thoughtful marketing.

First, their reliability:

I originally had T-Mobile for several years.  No problems, no worries, not one single dropped call.  The only problem was, I got absolutely no service out in the burbs, specifically at my parents'.  So, I figured, especially when several close friends switched to Verizon, why not follow suit, jump on the wagon, and save money with in-network calls?

BAD IDEA.  For the last two years of my contract with Verizon (thank god it's almost up), I've been plagued with dropped calls, zero bars of service in the middle of the city ON A HILL, and calls that refuse to get out of "calling... ... ... ... ..." mode instead of just frickin' "connecting..." already.

The past several weeks have been the icing on the cake, the final straw that broke the camel's back, etc. etc. etc.  The object of my anger, "burning like a thousand stars" as one colleague puts it, is Verizon's latest marketing ploy.  No joke, I've been getting calls from 1-800-310-5479 (a Verizon number, identified online) multiple times a day, anywhere from 8:00am to 10:00pm, EVERY DAY FOR THE LAST SEVERAL WEEKS.

It's brilliant marketing really.  "Hey, let's call up our customers from an unidentified 1-800 number, two-- no, five-- NO, TEN times a day.  But, get this, when they pick up, let's not say anything!!!  We'll just throw them our sales pitch when we've interested them enough to have them call US back at that same number! 'Thank you for calling Verizon Wireless.  Please hold on the line for the next sales representative to pitch our latest contract to you.' "

As one guy appropriately commented online in regards to that 1-800 number, it really is great marketing to hound your own customers to open new contracts with you.  It'll really keep them around.  Why would they ever possibly leave?

To the brilliant 420-smoking-'til-they've-got-no-viable-brain-cells-left Marketing Department at Verizon, this rant's for you.

I am sure many agree.  I hate driving through Big Dig.  It is still completely jammed for most of the day!  Where did our 14 billion dollars go?  I think the mistake was made in making the estimate of the vehicles traveled.

I went to the Old State House on Congress and State today to take my out-of-town guests, and saw some interesting stats on the Central Artery and Big Dig.

- The original raised Central Artery was built in 1959 and was designed to carry 75,000 cars a day. 
- In 1990 before it was demolished, it carried almost 200,000 cars a day. 
- New (Big Dig) Central Artery is designed to carry 250,000 cars a day.

I got a few gripes here. 
1) How was the “capacity” considered as 75K, but the road was carrying 200K cars?  If there were 200K vehicles traveling, isn’t the capacity of the road 200K? (I know, I know.  Maybe the capacity is # of cars it can support to travel without traffic or something.)

2) Going from 200K to 250K doesn’t seem like much. 25% increase seems like we will catch up fairly quickly.  Of course, unless we mean “250K capacity”, but it can actually hold like 700K cars (see #1 for definition of “capacity.”)

3) …wait, is it an increase from 75K to 250K?

4) 200K figure may be correct in a factual sense, but it ignores the fact that it is NOT a good estimate of how many cars “could” be traveling on it.  Bostonians avoided Central Artery at all costs because the traffic was so bad.  Many of those people wanted to take 93 but couldn’t.  (and now they do)

So, I sure hope we didn’t use this figure to come up with the 250K figure, because from my experience, we already got 250K riding on it.  What the heck are we gonna do now?  Go figure.  …sigh…