I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.

No, and I don’t care.

About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive

I just read this article over at the site formerly known as The Daily WTF.  It is about someone who worked for a government agency and couldn’t send e-mails to a client named Mr. Gookin, because the filtering system was flagging this as a racist e-mail.  Apparently “gookin” is a racial slur (I’ve certainly never heard it used).

This story doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is when I read some of the comments to the post, how many people have had the same thing happen.  And some of them are just completely ridiculous, like an e-mail containing the phrase “one group” because (if you remove the spaces) you can see the word “negro” in there (which I guess makes the United Negro College Fund a racist organization).  Or filtering out an e-mail containing the word “Saturday” (because of the “turd,” of course).  Or people with the name “Dick” that run into this problem all the time.  Or someone with the name “Callahan,” since that contains “Allah.”  Or the person who was involved with forensics, and frequently had e-mails to and from police departments filtered out (I guess it’s kind of hard to discuss a rape investigation without using offensive words like “rape” or “sex”).

What’s even worse than the stupidity of the filters is the refusal of many IT administrators to remove these words from the banned word list, even when it presents a problem to the employees.  And even when it prevents them from conducting business!

Fortunately I don’t have this problem at my office, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to exchange e-mails with Rakshit (that’s really the name of someone I work with).  But this kind of thing happens often enough that there is even a name for it: The Scunthorpe Problem, named after an incident in which AOL blocked mail from people living in Scunthorpe, England.  Follow the link if you’re not sure why...

I wonder if Spam Assassin blocks e-mails about Spam Assassin...

I recently was asked to come into work on a Saturday at my place of employ.  I have no problem with coming in to work on a Saturday if my work requires that I come in to finish something that has not fully been completed during normal business hours.  However, this day was a mandatory work day for the entire company, and the area in which I work had nothing pressing to accomplish that day.  Instead, the upstairs lab came in to work solely to clean the lab from top to bottom.  True, it needed this scrub down terribly, but still not badly enough to make us come in on a Saturday.  And that isn’t even the worst of the situation.  We were required to come into work at 5:30 am!!!  On a normal day I don’t go into work until 7:30 am, but on mandatory Saturday workdays, we have to go in two hours earlier, to clean.  We were also in no way compensated for coming into work that day.  Normally I would expect to receive time off back in place for this extra time we were putting in, but no that didn’t happen.  Also, if I decided not to come in on Saturday, they would take a day of vacation from me, even though I already put forty full hours that week.

There were about three other problems I had with coming to work this particular Saturday.  Shall I tell you about them??   I think I will even if you don’t like it.  The first being that I acquired a small chemical burn from the chemical cleaner that we were using to clean the lab.  I accidentally sprayed some of the cleaner on my forearm and about thirty minutes later, I had four or five nickel sized whelps on my arm.  They are now just a few red spots on my arm, but it has been over a week since it happened.  The second thing I had a problem with was that one of the other people I work with somehow managed to do practically no cleaning at all in a full eight hours.  He spent most of the day sitting at his desk chatting with everyone else in the lab while they cleaned around him.  When our bosses came back up to the lab, he continues to simply talk to them instead of clean while the rest of us cleaned our little tooshies off.  Well, needless to say, we cleaned and cleaned and he got the credit for it.  He has made procrastination a true art form.

I know this wasn’t exactly a fun or exciting post, but hey, at least I finally got around to making one!!!  Have a great day!!

No, and I don’t care.

In the month since the Wii was released, you’ve probably heard about problems with the wrist strap breaking, causing considerable damage.  I personally find it difficult to comprehend a scenario in which this would actually be a problem (and I’m not alone).  This past week our Wii moved out from under an evergreen and was placed beneath a television, and since then we have put in a lot of time on Wii Sports.  My two brothers especially enjoyed it, putting in nearly six hours of play time on Sunday alone.  In all of this time, there was no wrist strap present at all.  It only took about ten minutes for us to realize that the wrist strap did little besides get in the way.  I’ve yet to see a Wiimote even get dropped, much less thrown, even though we are all using full-force baseball swings and bowling ball tosses.

Is anyone else actually using the wrist strap?  If so, is it actually preventing anything?

Update:  My Wii friend code: 1974 6315 2837 8279.  Let me know your code if you want our Mii’s to mingle.

Two days ago some creeps broke into Stephanie’s car while she was at work.  All they took was her purse, which was in her trunk, and only contained her cell phone, her keys to my car, and some makeup things.  Apparently three other cars were also broken into before someone happened to come outside to use a cell phone and saw someone jump into the back of a car while the driver sped away.

So we had the cell phone deactivated immediately, and fortunately they had made no calls (at all).  After Stephanie was on hold with the Charlotte police department for over half an hour, she decided to submit the crime report online.  We had already decided that we probably were not going to see anything from the purse again, so our biggest concern was that they had the keys to my car and they could have written down our address from our car registration that was in the glove compartment (which was open when Stephanie first went to her car).  So we took my car to my office (which has 24-hour surveillance) and they said it’d be okay to leave it there for the night.  At about 10:45 I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize, that only showed up as “Pineville, NC” in the caller ID.  On the other end was someone claiming to be a police officer, who said someone had been brought into custody for breaking into cars and he was trying to find out whose cell phone this was.  Now, I am familiar with social engineering, so my first thought was that this guy had a set of keys and wanted to find the car it went to.  So I decided that if he asked for my address I was going to tell him I’d call him back at the number listed in the phone book for the police department.

Well anyway he never asked for our address, but he asked us if we could come down to the Pineville police department, so we did (after checking Google to make sure the directions he gave really go to the police department).  Of course, this was a forty-minute drive, even at 11:30 on a weeknight with no traffic.

When we got there, they took us to a room where another couple was sitting, filling out a police report.  He said his car was broken into while he was at the gym, and they took his credit cards.  When he called to cancel the card, the lady said it had been used two minutes earlier to charge $800 worth of stuff at Macy’s.  So they called the police who called mall security and had the guys on tape, and they went and arrested them.  We told the officer we had filed a report with the Charlotte police, but after he spent a while on the phone with them, they couldn’t find any record of it.  Later we found out why: a report submitted online does not go right into the system, it needs to be processed and basically reentered by some human being who apparently works nine-to-five.  They said this could take 48-72 hours.  So we filled out a police report in Pineville and got our stuff back and got back home at like 1:15.

The other couple was there when the guys were brought in, the told us that they were three kids that were about 16 or 17 years old, and apparently go to high school in Huntersville.  Also, their mom came in and started saying how there was “no way that they could have done this.”  I’m sure they hear that a lot at the police station...

All things considered, it was pretty fortunate that they found the guys and that they still had our stuff, since most of the time that just isn’t the case.  All it will cost us is a $10 fee to reactivate the cell phone, and whatever it will cost to fix the keyhole that was severely violated.

I just watched that video of Kramer flipping out after being heckled by some black audience members.  I know it’s week-old news but I’ll comment anyway.  So I guess these guys had been getting on his nerves the whole evening and he wanted to make fun of them in a shocking way, but he clearly went a little far.  In the subsequent apology on Letterman, a lot of the audience was laughing at first—understandably, they probably thought it was a bit, since most of Dave’s audience is probably people on vacation who hadn’t heard the news yet.  I find it ironic that the apology happened there because Jerry Seinfeld was on that night, so he was again riding Jerry’s coattails.

What is funny (to me, anyway) is that there was an episode of Seinfeld that was actually about hecklers, where Jerry went to where a heckler worked and started heckling him while he was doing his job.  Maybe that’s what Kramer should have done instead of dropping n-bombs.

Well I thought I’d have more to say about this topic when I started typing this, but I’m realizing that I really don’t care what someone I’ve never met says to someone I’ve never met in a city I’ve never been to.  So I’ll just leave you with a funny parody of the event to watch.

Due to recent increases in spam comments, you will now get a “captcha” confirmation page if you submit a comment that has any links in it.  So if you’re blind or otherwise using a screen reader: sorry, you cannot post links on my comments page at this time.  I thought about doing a challenge-response thing (where there would be a question like “enter the name of that red fruit that starts with A”), but I decided this would be easier (for me anyway). Update: Now the title and alt attributes of the image are a question whose answer is the word given.  Not that I know of any blind people using my site, but if there are now they can leave comments too.

I came up with a list of about 50 words (mostly names of fruits, animals, musical instruments, video game characters, and songs), put them in Photoshop and screwed around with the Liquefy tool, and added some random lines through them.  I think they are all still quite legible.

I’ve tested it a good bit, but as always, let me know if you have any problems submitting comments.