Know your target audience..

So I live in the midwest. Its cold this time of year. We have snow and ice and sub zero temps on occasion. Its just common sense that you dress for the weather. That you take your time driving and even walking.. for safety. Speed + Ice = bad news, be it on foot or in your car.

As I am headed out of work yesterday, I noticed someone had put up signs on all the doors leading out. They said something to the effect of "Inclement weather conditions has caused the threshold to be slippery, please take caution."

No those of you that read this blog probably see no reason to take issue with this sign. That is because you are at least semi-literate. At least when you aren't drinking. Here's the problem. There are close to 2000 employees where I work, not even taking customers into consideration. Now, as with any job, you have those that are educated and are in positions that need that education level to handle. You also have those that aren't quite up to that level. People that didn't graduate high school. I'm not being mean here.. its a statement of fact. With as many employees and customers as we have here, there is a fairly significant number of them. They aren't 'dumb' per se, but they have their limitations.

Back to the signs. Like I said, if you live in the midwest, you know that you have to be careful and ready for the weather and the conditions it brings. I know for example that a day like we have had for the last 3-4 days breed ice. It warms up just enough that if you throw some sun in there it melts the top layer of snow. This water then covers the clear spots on the ground, sidewalks, roadways.. and then as evening approaches it cools down and the sun goes away and that moisture turns to ice. I personally don't need a sign on the door warning me, I expect to watch for ice. I am prepared. I am aware.

The people who don't understand the ice causing conditions, or in general just aren't quite on the level where that common sense alerts them to be careful this time of year are the people you need to warn. Just like you remind a child who gets excited and wants to go running down the icy driveway to greet a friend, they need a reminder to watch for ice. The problem is, you have made the signs with language over their heads. What the signs all should have said in huge letters is:

WATCH OUT!
ICE BAD!
NO SLIPPY!

Simple, to the point, and on a level that the intended targets can read, comprehend and adhere to quickly before they step out into the danger zone. It's the same audience that warning labels for Husqvarna chainsaws are designed for:

"Do not attempt to stop chainsaw with your hands or genitals."

There are people that need these warnings. But they have to be in simple terms they can understand. They have to be consise. Let's be honest. These people have short attention spans and generally don't like to read. How else could reality TV have become so popular?

I say skip those warnings. If you need to be told to be ready for ice in the winter or to not eat your ipod shuffle...



... well then maybe it's what we like to refer to as natural selection. It's survival of the fittest. Look at nature. If you have a stupid gazelle that jumps off the cliff because no one warned him that he can neither fly nor survive a 200 foot drop, well then that gazelle has been removed from the gene pool. He can no longer endanger himself or others and hopefully this happens before they manage to pass on the stupid gene.

You have heard the phrase before.. the gene pool could use a little chlorine. There is some truth to that. Instead, we give the stupid people lots of money. If you put a steaming hot cup of coffee in between your legs, squeeze the lid off while driving and scald yourself...most people would realize they were taking a risk and got burned for being stupid. Stupid people however assume its someone elses fault for there not being a warning label telling them NOT to do what they just did. So they sue .. and a jury of their peers (which must be stupid people as well) gives them millions of dollars and the cycle continues.

There lots of stupid warning labels.. check out some more HERE.

To recap. If its winter time, always remember:

ICY. BAD. NO SLIPPY!

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Ahh back to work..

Nothing quite as exciting as being off for two weeks and then having to go back to work. Two weeks of sleeping in. No alarm clock. No schedules. No rushing to get ready to be out the door by 5am to be at work by 6. Ahh well the fun had to end at some point right?

Problem is, with being sick, I never got to adjust my sleep schedule back to where it should be before this morning. When you can't really breathe, its hard to sleep soundly. I have been restless the last 4 nights now, so even if I try to go to bed early, I am still up here and there. Never quite getting back on track. My alarm going off at 430 this morning was quite brutal let me tell you. Although whatever random new radio station I had tuned my alarm to because the signal was coming in well was definitely playing 'Humpty Dance' by Digital Underground this morning. That was something odd to wake up to let me tell you.

So here I am at work. Only two of us here this time of the morning. Nothing going on really. None of the stuff that was going to be starting this week seems to have actually gotten scheduled. I kept up on my email for the most part while on vacation so there were very few to plow through. No phone messages other than a wrong number call from some trucker looking for a shuttle ride from his truck out in the parking lot to the front door. I know its cold, but seriously? You need a shuttle ride for the 100 yards it takes to get from the truck parking to the front door?

Yesterday was a nice day even though I wasn't feeling 100% still. The boys and I went to lunch with my brother, sis-in-law and her parents who were visiting from CA. We had a nice time visiting with them again. Then it was back home for our xmas celebration. The boys had quite a few packages to open. We got their big items setup and they were happily playing away. We called my Grandfather for his 85th birthday later in the evening as well. Happy B-day again Grandfather!

One of the gifts from my parents was a trip to Disneyworld and Epcot Center in FL for the boys and I. I just got back from vacation, but we are all headed to FL to see everyone again for a long weekend in a couple of weeks. The boys are super excited to get to see everyone, visit Disneyworld .. and of course miss a few days of school.

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I know I did.

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A New Year?

Today is the start of a brand new year. I, like most people, have goals and ambitions and things I hope happen in the year to come. Some things I have control of and I have to use my own wilpower to make happen. Others I only have partial say in.. or have no control over at all. Still.. its always nice to be at Jan. 1 with a whole year ahead of you to work with.

As 2008 came to a close, I looked back on the year. There were bad times I am glad to be putting behind me, but there were way more good times than bad. I am blessed to have a wonderful family, great friends and a good job. With all the turmoil this country has been in for the past year, I am extremely grateful to have a job and a roof over my head and the ability to take care of my family. I really had to stop and realize, that despite my own pity parties I throw for myself over tough situations, there are so many that lost their jobs and homes. People that went from living comfortably to suddenly struggling to just put food on the table.

As we go forward into the new year, I am optomistic. Hopeful.

Enough waxing poetic. I know I normally ramble much longer, but I am sick. Yeah, I decided to go ahead and start 2009 with a nice full blown head cold. Sinus pain, headache, sore throat, stuffiness .. all the fun stuff! Our new years was fun but very low key as my sister is sick as well. We just hung out and watched movies and had a nice dinner together. Then C and I loaded up on cold drugs. I spent the rest of the evening dozing here and there. I was up after midnight to stumble into bed.. so that counts right?

I am just hoping for some relief before my flight tomorrow. 4 hours on a plane with a head cold does not sound like a good time to me. Yes, vacation is almost at an end. I had a wonderful time visiting with my family. I was lucky enough to get to spend almost 2 weeks here for the holidays. You know how it goes though.. towards the end you are ready to be at home in your own bed.. and that for me is just magnified right now by being sick. Let me curl up in my bed .. or shoot me and get it over with. I hate being sick.

It was 77 degrees here yesterday. I will be leaving those warmer temps and will be landing to a balmy high of 18 in Milwaukee tomorrow. Fun stuff. At least its supposed to be clear skies so I shouldn't be delayed. Really looking forward to seeing my boys. This was the first xmas I have spent without them. It was made easier by the fact that I was here with family and watching a 2 year old nephew at xmas time is a lot of fun. Still, just not the same without my boys.

Well I am going to curl up on the couch in a cold medicine coma again for the afternoon. I hope everyones New Years celebrations went well and that everyone is ready to start again.. fresh and new.

/cheers

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Happy Holidays!

I know its a bit early, but as I am officially on vacation as of this afternoon, I don't know how frequent this will get updates until after the 1st of the year. I am getting to go spend almost 2 weeks in Arizona with my family and celebrate the holidays there which I am really looking forward to. Apparently my nephew is ready to 'Rock Out!', which is his code for playing Rock Band 2 with me.

I know I said I don't like holiday work parties, but there are exceptions to that rule. Today work put on a killer spread for all the employees. Homemade mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, turkey, prime rib, salads. Awesome desserts. They were wandering around giving away frozen turkeys. Everyone got a gift certificate for free gas and cookies to take with them too. It was a great lunch and we all ate too much. Nap time now methinks.

We are in for a major winter storm tonight according to the weather channel which will make shuttling my son around for his last basketball game of the year, home for a quick shower and dinner and then into nice clothes for his winter music performance quite an adventure. 6-12 inches of snow being forcasted. Another winter storm predicted for Saturday too, which I am really hoping doesn't affect my travel plans for Sunday.

So, if I don't get around to posting, I wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday season. I hope you enjoy your time with family and friends. Travel safe.

/cheers!

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Humbug Indeed

Around the office I have a reputation as a Scrooge. The one who doesn't like the office celebration type crap. Its well deserved I suppose. I hate potlucks. I despise office secret santa exchanges. The idea in general of office celebrations bugs the crap out of me. If there are people at the office I want to spend that kind of time with, I'll make arrangements to do it outside of work. Why should I be forced to be 'festive' around people I wouldn't spend time with at all were it not for the fact that they work in the same department I do?

I just don't understand how me buying a $15 gift for some random person at the office in any way makes the holiday season better. Especially in a year where the economy is like it is and some family and friends have agreed to forgo exchanging gifts this year to ease the holiday stress.

And I still don't like potlucks. Everyone likes to bring in that special 'family recipe' dish that only people forced to eat that crap growing up have managed to acquire a taste for. No.. I don't want to try your Bolivian Yak Nutsack Soup or Fermented Green Bean and Liver Jello. If you insist on doing potlucks, have the decency to bring something people actually want to eat. Save your unique crap for people that have no choice but to be polite and eat that crap because its tradition or something.

If you want to celebrate the holiday season.. lets go out and get a couple of beers. Hell alchohol makes dealing with any office function much easier.

Enough scrooge ranting for now though. I watched Christmas Vacation with the boys this weekend. One of our holiday favorites. My brother and sister-in-law came over on Sunday for an epic marathon of Rockband 2. We managed to complete all 86 songs in the Endless Setlist 2. It was about 7 hours straight playing. We had 5 people so we were able to rotate people out for a break here and there. It was long and by the end we just wanted to be done, but it was fun just the same.

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Die Charter Die

I don't have a love / hate relationship with my ISP Charter. I have a hate / want to shank you / incoming shovel to the face relationship with them. I have two options for high speed internet in my area. Charter cable and Centurytel DSL. Centurytel is close to twice as expensive for 1/4 the speed so really, its not much of an option at all. So Charter it is.

For the most part, my internet works fine. Actually, the event that sparked this post, while interent related, wasn't really the fault of my modem at all. I got on last night, fired up Vent (voice chat), started streaming music, connected my IMs and brought up the guild web page. I then went to connect to World of Warcraft. Hmmm.. can't connect. Reboot modem, router and computer. Still nothing. Internet is working fine other than that.

So I start some troubleshooting. As most of you that read this aren't IT savvy, I'll skip most of the details, but I ran a continuous ping to the WoW logon server. This just checks on 1 second intervals to see if it can connect to the server. I was getting 80-90% packet loss. Meaning 1 or 2 out of 10 attempts was actually making it to the server. This does not work well for connecting and playing.

I hopped on charters support page where they have chat based support. I have found this is much faster than jumping through the hoops of the automated phone system. I start up a tech support chat and after a few minutes of pleasntries and verifying who I was, I explained that my tracert showed that the packets were having an issue getting from Charters network onto AT&Ts network. The woman I was talking to didn't even acknowledge that I had spoken and promptly tells me that she has reprovisioned my modem on their end and that all I need to do is reboot everything and I should be all set. I questioned this of course as the problem is not with the modem, but she refused to even talk to me more about it til I had rebooted.

So I went through the whole process again .. and of course the problem was still there. So I hope back on chat and get a different person. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Here's my acct info (blahblahblah). I already talked to someone and went through the reprovisioning, rebooting etc. I am NOT having a modem related problem. I am trying to talking to someone to get an investigation going on a problem with routing from Charter's network to AT&T that is preventing Charter customers from connecting to World of Warcraft servers.

CustomerServiceIdiot2: Do you have a router.

Me: Yes, I have a router. The router and modem are functioning fine however. I am online talking to you via that router and modem. I am streaming music and doing voice chat as well as surfing the web. Its not a hardware problem on my end, its a routing / connectivity issue between Charter and AT&T. I have a tracert I can show you.

CSI2: Sir, I need you to plug your modem directly into your computer to eliminate that as a problem.

Me: To what end? It is not the router. It is not the modem. Its not my computer. If the router was the problem, I would be experiencing packet loss on everything I am doing on through that connection, not isolated to one specific server on the internet.

CSI2: **Stunned silence for over 5 minutes while she furiously googles a response that might sound plausible.**

CSI2: Well see if there is heavy traffic on your through your router it can cause buffer overflows which might cause the kind of problem you are seeing. (*she crosses her fingers and squints her eyes hoping I will buy it)

Me: Yeah.. I don't think...

CSI2: I cannot help you further. Please remove the router and then call tier2 support at xxx-xxx-xxxx aka 1-800-WeRRetarded.


I know that statement doesn't mean much to most of you, but to put it into perspective, it would be much like your mechanic coming out with a bewildered look on his face clearly indicating he has no idea what is wrong with your car and then trying to tell a guy who rebuilds engines for fun in his spare time something along the lines of:

"Well see its your flux capicitor.. it wasn't getting the necessary 1.21 jiggawatts of power which caused it to warp and impinge on the round whirlygiggergizmodoohicky."

Anyway.. after marveling at the level of stupidity .. I called 'tier2' support. Turns out it was the same generic level of support you can get just by calling the usual 800 number. Which means.. if thats considered tier2.. then the idiots that cant even make that level man the chat lines and are probably sharing the same 3 brain cells among the pool of them. You just have to hope that the one you talk to is in current possesion of at least 1 of the 3 aformentioned brain cells.

So I call in.. jump through the hoops .. and after yelling 'AGENT' at the automated system for a few minutes I get to talk to a live human being. I explain everything to her .. offer to send a tracert log to her. She promptly starts to 'reprovision' my modem. I had to tell her to stop. Long story short, she couldn't help me. Her supervisor couldn't help me. None of them at that location were actually allowed to interact with the IT staff that would actually investigate such a problem. The best they could offer me was an email address to send the log too.

After arguing with all these people for over 25 minutes, I finally gave up. I was told to wait 48 hours and try again. I couldn't take it anymore. Someone was going to die if I didn't get off the phone. So I told them I would email the log and that they should review their procedures and be able to transfer a problem like mine to appropriately trained personell in a timely fashion. I was in the process of hanging up politely when I heard:

CSI3: Wait a second please Sir. I notice that you have our 5Mb interenet service. Are you aware that we have a 10Mb service and that currently its only 12 dollars more per month? Also did you know that we have excellent bundle packages to include that 10Mb service as well as digital cable?

Me: Stunned Silence for 30 seconds.

CSI3: Sir are you still there?

Me: Oh I'm here. See I was going to try to end this conversation without getting really upset, but you have made that impossible. Are you SERIOUSLY trying to upsell my account when my interenet connection is not working the way it needs to and you are completely unable to even understand what I am talking about much less be able to fix it or get me in touch with someone how can?

CSI3: Im sorry I can't do more, but are you interested in the 10Mb connection at all?

Me: What the hell? You are still trying to sell me a bigger package when you know I can't do what I want to do on the current one? So I get the 10Mb service and I can get stuck not connecting to the WoW servers.. ummm.. twice as fast? Are you seriously forced to try and upsell someone even when you know its a horrible idea at the time? Are you going to get fired if you don't?

CSI3: Im sorry.. is there anything else

Me: Look, I hate to rage on you because I know the policies are set for you. But use some common sense. If a customer is already upset over your companies ineptitude and inability to even get started investigating a problem, why on earth would said customer want to buy more services. That has all the tact of walking up to a widow walking out of a funeral for her husband and asking if you can have dibs on his big screen TV.

CSI3: Im sorry..

Me: Incoming yule log to the face. As I know you obviously weren't smart enough to realize what a crappy situation you were getting into with this job and their lack of technical knowledge and training, I shall only beam you once. Your supervisor is getting have a dozen whacks to the cranial region. I will then give him a yule log of his own that he can pass along said message to those responsible for the tragedy that is Charter tech support.


Ok.. so I the last line didn't really happen. It went more like **click** as I hung up the phone on her. I was thinking it though. Seriously.. it would have been just as effective if they set up a monkey at the zoo on tech support. Put a poster on the wall outside his cage with options like "reprovision modem" and "blame router" or "reboot computer". Then give the monkey big piles of poo and let him just go to town. Any square that get his by poo is what is given to the customer to try as a 'fix'.

I have had to call Charter tech support probably a dozen times over the years and not once have I had contact at the help desk with anyone I would say is even remotely knowledgeable in the area. They are clearly reading scripts and following a few procedures they know how to do but don't understand. Its maddening how frustrating it is dealing with them.

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I hate my life...

Please read this disclaimer before you email, call, txt, IM or otherwise try to contact me. I do NOT actually hate my life. I am fine, things are fine and all is well. Read the post before jumping to conclusions. :P

There is a song I head a couple nights ago that I just had to get and give another listen to. It's called "I Hate My Life" by Theory of a Deadman. What got me about this song is its catchy.. very catchy.. and yet its a guy basically bitching about all thats wrong in his life and how much he hates his life. Its almost like you take a morose country song's lyrics and put it to a upbeat, catchy rock tune. I love it. So many things in the song just crack me up. Here is the song.. the video is just a slide show as I can't find the actual video, but the song is right:



Lyrics like:
I hate all of the people
Who can't drive their cars
Bitch you better get out of the way
Before I, start falling apart

or

Well I hate my job, all my rich friends
I hate everyone to the bitter end
Nothing turns out right, there's no end in sight
I hate my life


I don't know.. they crack me up and I can relate at the same time. There are certainly days when I feel like nothing is going right. There are days when I road rage at the stupid people who can't drive to save their lives. Days when crap is coming down at work.. or in my personal life that makes me feel overwhelmed and that is when I start feeling the desire to pummel people about the head and neck reason with object like shovels and frozen turkeys.

Really though, in general I am a very easy going, happy person. I like my life. I just have those moments, as we all do, where you just want to go "WHAT THE FUCK?!?!" People, events .. that set you off or make you hate your life at that point in time. It happens. Things you think are going well, change. Stuff you expected to go one way, go another. Unexpected things that you just REALLY didn't need to happen right then. That's life unfortunately.

So to clarify and allay my mother's fears, I am fine. Things are good. I am happy. I just happen to love this song and had to share. Enjoy.

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