UnleashYourAnger.com

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…

From Time, Mark Halperin:

 3. The national press will be obsessed with the story for days and days to come, with no downside for Obama; the local press coverage when Kennedy travels for Obama will be ginormous.

Yes, that's right.  He actually used the word "ginormous."  For real.  It's right there, in print, in an internationally recognized news publication.

Let's just be blunt here: he sounds like a fifth grader saying that.  And because of it, I can't take anything else he says in that article seriously.

I don't really follow his column.  I just happened upon it because there was a link to it on the front page of CNN (!).  Maybe it's technically a blog, I don't really care.  Whatever format he's writing in, how can he expect people to respect his opinion when he has to resort to using made-up words to get his opinion across?  Is it some sort of effort to appeal to the youth?  Is he trying to be COOL? 

Get real, Mark.  Act like a professional.  Write like you like, graduated from like, the fifth grade.

I live in Sturbridge and commute on Mass Pike.  Have you guys noticed those humongous cell phone towers that are meant to look like trees?

I think the intention is good, but I think those things are very ugly.  I mean…did they think they could fake people by painting these trees brown and with fake leaves?  It’s not like the fact that the “tree” is 200 feet and 4 times as tall as the one next to isn’t a big give away.

I’d like to unleash my anger on drivers who brake even though no one else is braking.  I hate driving behind these people who can’t control their speeds.  The brake lights constantly going on and off…why do they do that?

Isn’t it quite simple?  Just keep the speed maintained with the flow of traffic.  Everyone else is, so why can’t you?  Don’t go faster than the car in front of you.  You will never be magically transported to the front.   (For that matter, don’t go slower than the car in front of you and leave room, but that’s for another rant.) 

Keep this rule of thumb…you should NOT have to brake unless the car in front of you is braking.  Please, please, remember this!  If you don’t know what I am talking about, please self-reflect for a moment, and think if you are doing this.  It might just be you, but you just never noticed.

You are wasting gas.  You are wasting your brake pads.  You are angering people behind you!  Stop!!!!