The minor rants thread.
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if i sing avenueQ it's usually "The internet is for porn"
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Oh yes, I saw it a few weeks back.
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Somebody at the radio station I'm listening to keeps pushing the wrong button. Brief snippets of "Supported by ..." or some other music keep interrupting the "real" music. It was happening last night, and it's happening again/still this morning.
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I have $299 on an American Express Serve card. It's a sub-account, so I can't add money to it, only my dad can (he uses it to pay for things when he wants to buy me presents but let me pick it out. I've informed him we're not doing this again this way.) I had $300 but fees ate $1.
The present turns out to cost $307. I want to add $8 of my own money to this balance and buy the present.
The merchant only accepts Paypal. I have a Paypal account that is not tied to a bank account, and a Google Wallet account.
I cannot:
- Use the Serve Card to buy most of the present and then pay for the rest separately, because Paypal declines my Serve card. AmEx has no idea why, they didn't decline the transaction, they never saw anything but the preauth come through.
- Use the Serve Card to fund my Google Wallet account, to which I can add my own money from my debit card to pay for the total. It registers as a credit card, and you can't fund the account from a credit card, only a debit card.
- Use the Serve Card to fund my Paypal account, because I don't have a linked bank account (
?) - Fund the Google Wallet account $10, set it to use the Wallet funds first, then draw from the Serve card, because Google Wallet blocks all Paypal transactions because the companies hate each other.
- Fund the Paypal account $10 as in 4, because of 3.
I'm left with:
6) Withdraw money from an ATM (meaning I have to drive across town to find an in-network ATM that it'll let me withdraw from), in multiples of $20 (losing $19 in the process), then deposit it into my bank account, and pay for the present from my debit card.Fuck everyone involved in this situation.
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- Pay yor dad $8 and have him add it to the card ?
Edit: that's a 7, not a 1, in case anyone is wondering.
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But then, as evidenced in 1, Paypal won't take the Serve Card anyway, so I can't just pay for the whole thing with the Serve card.
I think I can transfer the lost $19 back to my dad though, so it's not in limbo forever
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Right. Missed that. Sorry.
I would pay from my own pocket and use the card whenever I next buy groceries. All money is green anyway.
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I considered that, but I'm worried the grocery store won't take the card anyway. At least if I get as much cash out of it as I can, and return the rest to my dad, I can sleep easier.
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Buy gift certificates from Amazon for the merchant. They take almost anything.
But here's the real problem:
The merchant only accepts Paypal.
That right there is enough to get me to turn around and go elsewhere. Fuck Paypal right up the ass.
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Paypal unfortunately still pretty much monopolizes the "I have a small company and a website, I want to sell goods, but I don't want to handle credit cards directly" segment. They make it so easy to embed their shopping cart in your site, people overlook the huge downsides.
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Paypal unfortunately still pretty much monopolizes the "I have a small company and a website, I want to sell goods, but I don't want to handle credit cards directly" segment.
Google and Amazon are just as easy to set up, and I trust both of those companies and order of magnitude more than I trust Paypal. (Which is saying a lot, considering my opinion of Google.)
Moreover, none of these payment processors are mutually-exclusive. You can use both Paypal and Google simultaneously.
There's no monopoly here, you just found a lazy merchant run by a lazy bastard who doesn't care if he gives a satan-company a percentage of his business and basically fuck that guy.
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Indeed. Paypal wouldn't accept my credit card (and direct debit. and anything else, really) some time back. The reason listed on the website: "Computer says no."
The telephone hotline wasn't much more helpful: "Computer says no." - "But why?" - "Don't know. Don't want to know. Can't be arsed, really."
Contacted the vendor ('twas Ebay, Paypal was the only option listed for some reason), negotiated another form of payment and done.
I guess their computer calculated in some weird way that I was a risk for some obscure reason - ran afoul of such an algorithm one year later, when another vendor didn't accept this credit card again.
The helpline was a bit more helpful this time but didn't really grasp why a previous email which stated the reasons for the refusal as: "We suspect that you're a fraudster!" (I'm not kidding) didn't exactly improve my mood.
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Paypal was the only option listed for some reason
For some reason?
In eBay it's PayPal or bust. Or Skrill, whatever that is.Unless you already knew and were just being sarcastic.
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Someone finished up my milk.
My workplace doesn't provide the makings of tea and coffee, so we all bring our own and the fridge is full of 1-pint bottles of milk with initials on them.
Obviously, there is a certain amount of depredation when people find themselves short. I'm not precious about it unless it seems like I'm losing a lot - on the odd occasion I've borrowed a coffee's worth myself.
But you use a mostly full bottle, right? Who the hell uses up a bottle with one cup's worth left in it, carefully held back from the morning's coffee so that the owner could have another cup in the afternoon, when half the bottles in the fridge are more than half full?
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Frees up some fridge space for you to put your own milk in.
Also, what kind of hellish place are you working at that doesn't even provide milk? That's maybe a couple of quid a day? Shows they have no respect for you at all IMO
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Frees up some fridge space for you to put your own milk in.
It's not that full.
Also, what kind of hellish place are you working at that doesn't even provide milk? That's maybe a couple of quid a day? Shows they have no respect for you at all IMO
Tell me about it. Though honestly that's the least of my complaints. Top of the list would be the state of the loos...
But I'm only working here for a few more weeks. They aren't renewing my contract because they've been doing some restructuring and my employer won't play ball with their new preferred model of pricing for contractors.
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You mean they won't be making the same obscene profit off you that they expect from a mountie?
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their new preferred model of pricing for contractors.
"drastic pay cuts"?
Before you go you should deploy a sabotaged milk container.
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doesn't even provide milk?
Ours only provides non-dairy creamer. There's several containers of half-and-half in various fridges throughout the building brought in by those who prefer real dairy.
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Did you ever learn why they call us that? I've always wondered.
The M stands for Mountfield Software, one of two companies that merged to create the one we know and love today. Moountfield was a consulting firm and called its people "mounties", which made a lot more sense then than it does now
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Also, what kind of hellish place are you working at that doesn't even provide milk?
And why is everybody working there so stingy that they all buy their OWN milk and label it rather than just whenever it runs low whoever notices buys another carton for everybody? It's milk, not gold dust.
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This. Given how milk is priced, it's probably cheaper to have a jar and have everyone chuck in a few bucks and someone buy a gallon or two every week rather than everyone buy pints
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Perhaps someone's a special snowflake and uses soy "milk".
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One special snowflake can buy their own milk. We have one person here who has her own pint of skimmed milk, everyone else uses the communal semi-skimmed
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Low-fat milk? Ugh, might as well use soy "milk".
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And why is everybody working there so stingy that they all buy their OWN milk and label it rather than just whenever it runs low whoever notices buys another carton for everybody? It's milk, not gold dust.
Because one person will use inordinate amounts of the good common milk.
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What? Don't you hate it when somebody in your office takes that last bit of milk?
...or the last piece of fried chicken?
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I'm paralyzed by the plethora of choices for a counter-troll. I think I may need to lie down for a bit.
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I think I may need to lie down for a bit.
There.
There you have an unfair advantage....
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I think I may be the new n-word.
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I think I may be the new n-word.
"Floatin on a raft on the river. Life sure is fine? Ain't it, @Boomzilla Jim?"
"Sho' nuff, Huck"
Filed under: I can't tell if I'm channeling Mark Twain or Robert Parker...
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And why is everybody working there so stingy that they all buy their OWN milk and label it rather than just whenever it runs low whoever notices buys another carton for everybody? It's milk, not gold dust.
It's more a question of organisation than stinginess. There is usually a four-pinter in there and one or two 2-pinters, so I guess some people do.
Also they sell pint bottles in the site shop, and most people buy from there (at least, most people have the particular brand they sell there rather than supermarket brands), even though it's twice the supermarket price and usually has a very short expiry date. I guess people are just really lazy.
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Also, what kind of hellish place are you working at that doesn't even provide milk?
Here, they don't provide coffee, everybody buys their own. Which makes the coffee machine stand pretty much unused, because it's one of those models where you just pour half a pack of coffee beans into a grinder, so it's pretty much physically impossible to not share coffee.
That's not too bad, though. The worst is that there's no water cooler, nor any source of drinkable water other than buying your own bottled, or bringing your filtering jug.
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The worst is that there's no water cooler, nor any source of drinkable water other than buying your own bottled, or bringing your filtering jug.
Yeesh, at least we have a hot/cold water machine.
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The worst is that there's no water cooler, nor any source of drinkable water other than buying your own bottled, or bringing your filtering jug.
What's wrong with the plumbing?
Where do you live where it's even LEGAL to have a building without drinkable water on every floor? Liberia?
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What's wrong with the plumbing?
Well, drinkable as in "enjoyable to drink", not "won't murder you to drink it".
Tap water isn't poisonous, but has a bad chlorine tinge in my city.
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Tap water isn't poisonous, but has a bad chlorine tinge in my city.
Let it warm up by 10 degrees or so before drinking. That'll encourage the chlorine to come out of solution.
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That's not too bad, though. The worst is that there's no water cooler, nor any source of drinkable water other than buying your own bottled, or bringing your filtering jug.
That's a bummer. My company at least provides a Keurig coffee pod machine and several flavors of coffee, and bottled water.
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Tap water isn't poisonous, but has a bad chlorine tinge in my city.
Snort. You think that's bad, you should try Dallas. Or actually, you should NOT try Dallas tap water.
I've lived all over the eastern half of the US. Everywhere, people complain about the tap water. In Texas, there's almost no natural lakes--all the lakes we get water from are artificial, created by damming rivers. This kills trees in the flood valley, and we wind up with this truly horrible algae or something that imparts a vile--and yes, I mean vile taste to the water. It's so horrible you have to double-filter water to get rid of the taste: pouring it once through (say) a Brita pitcher will not do more than take the edge off it.
And that's not even getting into the period twice a year when the rainy season starts, and all the lake-bottom mud gets churned up, and the water gets even worse. It tastes like you'd imagine strained water from an actual swamp, possibly one with ROUSes, would taste.
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In Texas, there's almost no natural lakes--all the lakes we get water from are artificial, created by damming rivers.
That's like round here. I'm guessing we spend more on filtration, and sometimes our water is really chlorinated, almost to the point of being usable as mild bleach. (I don't live in an area that uses aquifers; we get more than enough rain most years to not need that approach.)
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I'm guessing we spend more on filtration, and sometimes our water is really chlorinated, almost to the point of being usable as mild bleach.
You would literally have to do that in Dallas, and/or apply (possibly multiple) extra filter stages as well.
Every place I've ever lived I've been willing to drink (possibly filtered) tap water. But not here: I buy bottled water (in bulk, so it's at least relatively cheap). It's just too much trouble.
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Minor rant: Progress is generally not a sql language, but it has sql support, and comes with jdbc and odbc drivers. The odbc driver has a fascinating, by which I mean "wildly annoying if you run into it" quirk. The character data type is like a sql varchar. When you define a DB field or character variable, you specify a format mask, and don't bother specifying a max size. the format mask is only used for display; you can safely store more characters in the variable than the mask calls for: all that happens is that (by default) a display statement will only display as many characters as are in the mask.
A character variable automatically gets a default shadow property, "sql width", that is set (by default) to twice the format mask length, but you can override it. Except that if you have a record with a field that has more characters in it than the sql width, a select statement will silently fail to retrieve that row! Write a query that you expect to return 5 rows, and one of them has "too many" characters in it, you'll get back 4 rows. (Or maybe none; it's been a while since I tested this.) About once a year this causes a problem to a customer. that's an average; I don't think we've run into this in 2-3 years, but we had two customers get bitten by it on different field in the last 2 months or so.) Because of the nature of the beast, you will only ever run into the problem if you are using the ODBC driver for an external report or something.
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It's so horrible you have to double-filter water to get rid of the taste: pouring it once through (say) a Brita pitcher will not do more than take the edge off it.
Yeesh -- I wonder what the water utility does about all the complaints they get.
It tastes like you'd imagine strained water from an actual swamp, possibly one with ROUSes, would taste.
You mean there are:in your swamps?
Besides, I suspect that there are a fair few wetlands out there where the water in them is cleaner than what comes out of a Dallas tap...
Capybara - Wikipedia
