Blog of Josh Hall

Pittsburgh got a nice little write-up in the New York Times.   They got pretty nitty-gritty too, when i saw the mattress factory, I knew we we’re dealing with the average tourist here.  Looks like someone stopped to appreciate the underground and artsy side of the burgh without getting caught up in mass-consumer tourism guides.  This story reminds me of a story that ran in the city paper a while back about some guy from New York who ended up buying one of the buildings downtown because it was cheap and he liked pittsburgh enough to do it.  It’s good to see some New Yorkers escaping the BIG city and appreciating the finer things that a small city has to offer.

So the lot across from your house is over grown with weeds and you decide to clean it up.  You get out your tools and get to work.  A few minutes later, a guy walks by and starts to talk to you by saying things like, "So you got tired of it looking bad?" and then he starts to help you out by pulling weeds for you.  Then another gent strolls by, your new friend and him walk about 30 feet away from you, huddle close to one another, and you see what looks to be an exchange of something.  You do not know what was exchanged, but their hands certainly met with more than a hand shake.  Then your new friend comes back and helps you out by using your weed whacker and doing a great job.  You take a break, offer him some water, and he offers some conversation about how he likes just to help people and pick up a few bucks here and there.  He says the barber down the street pays him $20 to pick up trash from the lot next to him.  So you know he’s expecting money now.  After an hour or maybe a little more, you’re all done.  What you thought might be an all day effort was just completed thanks your new friend.  Now, do you pay him for his work?  Do you give him a talk about drugs?  Do you offer to help him if he needs it?

Every time i look at my $75 a month cable bill, I wonder why I pay it.  I was so happy without cable, and if I lived alone, there would be no cable.  I don’t understand why I have to pay so much money for something that gives me commercials.  This opens another topic about why the television was created and marketed the way it was, which really has some interesting literature and documentaries apropos, but this rant is not about that.  It’s just about my recent encounter with comcast.

So I’ve been a comcast customer for over 6 years now in one form or another.  full blown digital subscriber, just basic tv, then to the standard package where I sit now.  All the time, I’ve been enrolled in automatic bill payments with no paper bills mailed to me.  Bliss.  It’s a never changing bill, so i don’t need to look at it, i just expect that much to taken out each month.  So for years this goes on fine.  Back in december, I logged in to change my credit card information.  Still, all works fine, until May, apparently.  In June, I get a "past due" notice in the mail.  WTF?  So i call the number and try to see what’s up.  The representative was utterly useless.  She kept stating the obvious, "No payment was made in May."  And I say, "umm…I know, otherwise I wouldn’t have received a past due notice.  What I need you to do is fix it so it doesn’t happen again."  It’s absolutely ridiculous how inept this person is, and coming from a helpdesk background, I know how things should go here, and this is terrible.  So I ask her to take off the late fee, and she says she doesn’t have the ability to do that.  She doesn’t seem to have the ability to do anything I need her to do, so I ask to speak to her manager, or at least someone with the access to remove late fees.  She says only supervisors can, and they can call me back within a 24 hour period.  So it’s going to be one of those deals, aye?  Whatever.  I leave instructions to call my cell phone and not my home number.

So I log into comcast’s website, and I see that my credit card information shows a credit card that expired in 2006.  WTF?  That’s not my fault.  To me, sounds like someone had a system crash and reverted to a backup with old information.  The last time I changed my info was in december, and it’s been working since then.  I update the information and wait for my call back to get that late fee removed.

Of course, it never comes.  I’m livid.  I do automatic bill payment so i don’t have to deal with crap, now they’re making me take time out of my day to deal with crap that is their fault.  I call them back today, and get some lady who again has this crazy knack for saying things that are utterly useless.  I say that my information was reverted to old information, and I didn’t do anything, so something changed on their end.  She said she doesn’t even have the access to do that, as if I meant SHE did it.  She’s totally defensive at anything I’m saying, and I can see that I will never get retribution for my time wasted with these people.  She was able to remove the late fee pretty easily.  She says that they did try to call me, but they used my home number even though I had left instructions not to use that number.  She said that she could have someone call me back within 24 hours so that I can ask a supervisor why my payments didn’t go through, but honestly, I don’t feel like investing my time, nay, my VACATION, in finding and fixing the flaws in their system.  This is what helpdesk tickets are for.  I open a problem ticket, you fix it.  Don’t call me back until it’s fixed.

So all to appropriately, I don’t expect any calls from Comcast any time soon.

Do you ever think there’s been a situation where someone had to chose to date someone with the same name as their pet?  Like, if I had a dog named Jessica…I’d be pretty hesitant to ever dating a girl named Jessica…really, I think she’d feel the same about me.  Right? 

Yay, I’m secure enough in my adulthood to tell this little gem.  Maybe a testament to my social awkwards, maybe a propellant of my social awkwardness…who’s to say, either way, what a childhood.  So I was in scouts as a kid, and really had a great time all along.  If I remember correctly, I skipped the smallest ranking of cub, but had 2 years of wolf, 2 years of bear, and I think there is a 3rd rank in there before webelo scout...had to google it, bobcat.  Webelo is where all the cool stuff happens, in my opinion, but as you can see, i was pretty well invested in the program with around 7 or 8 years involved.  Towards the end, I started getting less and less involved, perhaps a little disinterest on my part, perhaps some parental differences, perhaps going to a private school instead of the public school that all the other kids went to, but probably a mix of all of the above.  I think there was a time where I had missed like 3 months of activity and one day my dad just said, "You’re going." when I wanted out because I didn’t know anyone anymore.  Anyway, it was a night where there was some structured lecture thing going on, maybe about 50 kids in the room sitting in a grid of fold out wooden chairs.  I don’t remember how old I am, I think 5th grade, but certainly old enough to know when I need to go to the bathroom, and I did know I had to…just not sure of what protocol was necessary to go.  Welcome to my oppressed childhood.  The scout master is up there rambling on and on, and I’m stuck worried about getting in trouble for interrupting if I just got up and went to the bathroom without someone’s permission.  I tried my hardest to wait.  I knew it couldn’t be long until the end of the meeting.  I don’t know anyone here anymore.  I really don’t want to be here.  Then I just let it flow.

  I remember now that I was wearing brand new white sneakers too.  I just sat there waiting for the meeting to end…not that I new what to do once it ended…but yeah…I was deer in the headlights mentally.  Then the others caught on.  "Dude, you’re leaking" someone said.  I played confused and tried to blame it on a leak in the ceiling…haha, wow.  "I know, this crazy leak in the ceiling is falling right onto my crotch and I just don’t know what to do about it since I am chained to this chair and the chair is nailed to the floor" seemed like a good explanation at the time at least.  The scout master said the final words, something that would start everyone to get up and do some kind of pledging, and I bolted in the crowd of movement.  I ran outside, with no destination in mind, I was thinking about hiding in a bush until I saw my mom, but thank God she had already parked the van in the parking lot and was cleaning it out.  Mom to the rescue…again.  I remember balling my eyes out trying to explain what the crap I just did.  I can’t even imagine what was going through her head.  She helped me come up with a plan to sneak into the house so that Serah and J’aime wouldn’t see.  I think they did though.  That, or my mom told them later.  I know my dad told them later.

You’d think that’d be it though, right?  Nah, dad says I’m not allowed to quit.  Time to go to a weekend camping trip with the troop.  I was not friends with the kids before because I just didn’t know them, but now they’re not friends with me because I’m the kid who peed his pants.  They stuck me in a tent with one of the older kids, probably so I didn’t get beat up.  I don’t remember much of that weekend, really it seemed like it went pretty well in retrospect.  We camped at a small airport and I got to fly in a plane for the first time.  There was a helicopter there too, and I really liked helicopters.  The worst part about it though was spaghetti was on the menu for the whole weekend…and I didn’t eat spaghetti.  It was ham barbecue for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Since that weekend, I’ve never been able to eat a ham barbecue sandwich without emotionally cringing.  It has become the embodiment of one of the worst childhood experiences I can remember.

Soon, you’ll be able to register any top level domain (TLD) you like.  A TLD is like the .net, .com., .org, .gov, etc of websites.  This will be chaos on a stick.  So many peope are going to be "cybersquatting" which means I would go and register .pepsi before Pepsi would, and if they wanted it, they could buy it from me, if I was willing and liked their offer.

This might at first be a new and inovative thing, but this is not an expansion of our current system if this turns out how I think it will.  No one will be registering .com sites anymore.  So what we’ll really see is a change of our existing orderly and common knowledge system.  The ctrl+enter keyboard shortcut will be used less and less when going to websites.  Everyone is just going to be cutting off the .net and .com and all that, so we’re basically eliminating the TLD system and it will be a free-for-all.

granted, I’m already thinking about registering .joshhall, because I think i could get ahead of the others out there…i dunno.  it’s approved.  It’s happening.  We’ll see if it’ll will be the epic fail i’m expecting it to be.