A Rant of Sorts

Sometimes I fret over what non-sense I can spend a few minutes of day writing on this thing. Some of those days I come up with something that is just a little bit less pointless than everything else and so I write about that. Some of those days, like today, I can't really think of anything that would make for a full on post. Sometimes, awesome things just fall in your lap.

We've all had our run ins with customer service and as the world of business moves away from people and more towards automatically generated email messages it would seem that responses like the one below are going to be all the more common. Will someone on the other end even read this? You wouldn't possibly say this had their been a person on the other end of the phone as opposed to server space on the other end of the interweb. One thing's for sure, sometimes, it just feels good to say/type exactly what it is you feel.

(The author of this beautifully crafted email's identity will be kept anonymous)

Dear ProFlowers.com,

No way will I "finish my order" on "flowers for mom", despite your ridiculous 10% off offer that I just received via email. Advertising flowers for $19.99 and then charging $30 for delivery, $3 for some other bullshit, sales tax, and whatever other crap you tacked on is some crazy shit. My order total once I placed it in my shopping cart and provided my info was nearly $58 - for delivery of a $19 bouquet on Mother's day. I can't even begin to imagine what the total would be had there not been a special discount and a free vase on that order. It was reduced down to $48 when I changed the delivery date to the day before (but who wants to send their mom flowers on NOT-mother's-day?) Still some crazy shit.

So let's just break this down real quick: I spent time picking out the right flowers, filling in all your forms, all the while assuming that the delivery fees would be high, but somewhat reasonable. I was a happy camper. Then, all of a sudden out of nowhere, WHAM!! BAM! FIFTY-EIGHT DOLLARS PLEASE! Screwed.

You should feel guilty.

Regards,

Person

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On another totally unrelated note I'm becoming less and less interested in watching the news with is sad because I feel like I'm just starting to get to that age where I should be more and more concerned about what's going on in the world. But, it's hard to watch the news when the leading story is the latest saga in who Tiger Woods is banging or that Kate from Jon and Kate plus 8 got kicked off of Dancing with the Stars and it makes her kids sad that people critique her mom. I got news for those kids, what those judges are saying is nice compared to how 90% of America feels about either of their parents. But I digress.

Yesterday, Jill sent me a link to a story on the Washington Post's website where an author literally did a write up a tiny pile of snow still left over from February's snow storms. I mean really? We live in the DC area, somebody is bound to have just gotten shot and that's at least better news than well packed snow that refuses to melt. They posted a before and after picture as if the snow had gone on The Biggest Loser or something. Why is that a story?

Am I the only one that is pretty sure Metro is being ran by an intern? This morning there was a report there will be adjustments to the Red Line. I don't know this for sure, but I've always heard that the Red Line is the most use of the five options. The adjustments were described as follows:

Add Cars.
Cut Trains.
Increase Time Between Trains.

But, if 2/3s of those jump out at you as the opposite of progress, don't worry, Metro authorities say that these adjustments will help ease Red Line congestion. Let's do the math. Most trains have 6 cars, but they can have up to 8. If you cut 1 train, that's 3 trains that now need 2 extra cars each just to break even. When you increase the wait you aren't spreading out those 2 cars per train as evenly as you would if a standard 6 car train showed up on the current schedule. That's just more people standing on the platform trying to squeeze into two extra cars.

I know this might be crazy, but here's an idea, how about adding cars to the same number of trains and keep the same schedule. Maybe metro is just being ran by idiots.