Sunday, Debtember 01, 2024
Still more email for Sean Conner, and a disturbing warning from Gmail
Ah, the start of the Christmas season! A time when a lot of people visit friends and family for the holidays. So it wasn't terribly surprising when I received an invitation for a family reunion. For the GXXX family out of Chigaco, from, as it turns out, my Uncle James PXXXXXXX . The only thing is—I don't have any known family in Chicago, much less know anyone in the GXXX family, nor do I have an uncle names James PXXXXXXX.
Sigh.
People!
Please!
Double check email addresses if you are unsure,
just don't blindly assume that firstnamelastname@gmail.com will end up with the right person.
Also, in the email chain, I see Gmail label my outgoing email with a large cautionary warning in bold on a red background:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL]: Use Caution
Gee, thanks Gmail. How long until you start outright rejecting email to or from anyone not using Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail? Or am I just too cynical?
Monday, Debtember 02, 2024
Notes about a photo album found abandoned on the floor of a storage facility
Bunny and I went to the storage unit to pick up the Christmas decorations. I was grabbing a cart in the entrance to the unit when I saw a photo album lying on the ground. On the cover was a pictute of a teenaged girl riding a horse. Curious, I picked it up and flipped through the pages. There were you typical images of family but towards the middle of the book the theme of the pictures changed—lots of nude women at some form of festival during the day, surrounded by leering men. There were several pages like this and I can only guess that it was some form of contest for the women. Past that section, the pictures turned back into innocent family pictures again.
Family, family, family, nude women, nude women, more nude women, family, family then blank pages—nearly half the album was empty. There was no indication of ownership in the book at all.
Wierd.
But we were there to get Christmas decorations, not to page through a home-grown Hustler magzine, so I placed the book back down were I found it and we got busy gathering the decorations.
After we were done, the photo book was still on the floor. I picked it up again, intending to turn it into the “lost-and-found” pile at the office (if they had one), only the office was closed for the day. I then placed it, yet again, on the ground where I found it.
For all I know, it's still there.
NaNoGenMo seems … kind of silly to do these days
For the past few days just as I'm falling alseep, I think, yes, I could make a post about that, only to completely forget about the next day. I finally remembered what I wanted to post about—NaNoGenMo. Or rather, how I completely forgot about it this year (and kept forgetting to write about it—sheesh).
And last year.
And the year before.
And the year before that.
Has it really been five years since I last participated?
I think it fell off my radar once ChatGPT (which is “cat, I farted” in French) hit the scenes. Or rather, the current spate of software that was released into the world in 2020 and it became trivially easy to generate nonsensical text (and images, and music, and code, and …). It also looks like participation in NaNoGenMo has dropped significantly since 2020:
| year | # novels (roughly) |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 80 |
| 2014 | 145 |
| 2015 | 184 |
| 2016 | 138 |
| 2017 | 127 |
| 2018 | 105 |
| 2019 | 138 |
| 2020 | 78 |
| 2021 | 87 |
| 2022 | 50 |
| 2023 | 36 |
| 2024 | 30 |
There's just … no challenge anymore.
Tuesday, Debtember 03, 2024
Ice ice baby
Last month the ice maker in our refrigerator broke. So I called the manufacturer and for a hefty price, they arranged for a local repair company to repair or replace the ice maker. About a week later, the technician showed up, failed to remove the broken unit, and decided that it needed replacing and would be back in a few days.
The following week the technician showed up again, bitched that we failed to answer his messages. I explained that I set my phone to have a silent default ring tone due to spam, and a default text tone of silence, again due to spam (and man, the amount of text spam I recieved from politicians during election season was staggering! Damn you policitians and exempting yourselves from spam laws! Damn you all to hell!). The technician was nonplussed and said I should do something about that. We gave him Bunny's phone number as she doesn't have a silent default ring tone.
The technician also realized he had the wrong model of ice maker. He said he would order yet another replacement and get back with us when he had the new ice maker. That was the week of Thanksgiving, so it wasn't too surprising that we didn't hear back that week.
Well, now it's the following week and we hadn't heard anything. But I failed to keep notes and didn't have a phone number of the actual company doing the work. Nor was I sure of the name of the company doing the work. The manufacturer had set this all up, so today I called the manufacturer to see what was going on.
Three times.
Twice my cell phone died because the battery isn't worth it anymore. And that's the replacement battery—the original battery wasn't worth it either. And each time, I had to start over with a new person, only to die just prior to any form of resolution. It was on the third call, using Bunny's phone, plugged into mains power to ensure her phone's battery didn't die on me, that I finally got the number to the company they contracted for work.
I then called the contractor company and was told that the work had been completed and accepted by us! If I wanted, I could make a new ticket to repair or replace our “new” ice maker, but the ticket was closed. Even when I told the representative that the technician failed to replace the ice maker, I was just told the work order was closed. I told them I wasn't going to pay the hefty price again and I was told to take that up with the warantee company, who paid them to do the work, which was done, by the way.
I called the manufacturer back, and this was a very surreal call. I explained the situation; they then called the contracting company (and I waited on hold for this), only to be told they were given the same story as I was given—the work was completed, the order is done. The representative had me check the ice maker and yes, I did find a serial number, model number and a lot number. I rattled off said information and the representative was surprised that we had apparently installed an ice maker from their competitor. I said it was the unit installed when we received the refrigerator and had been working for well over a year, but the representative said the model number just didn't match the model numbers they used. And as the contracting company refused to do anything, I was told I should probably dispute the charges with the credit card company.
I guess.
I have to wonder what happened … did the technician just close the wrong ticket? Just said “XXXX it, that couple was a pain to work with” and just lied? I don't know.
All I know is, we should have just used ice trays and foregone the ice maker.
Wednesday, Debtember 04, 2024
Why list a phone number if no one at your company even knows how to deal with the notification?
Sigh.
Yet another email for Sean Conner arrived.
- From
- Consumer Support <consumersupport@XXXXXXXXXX>
- To
- sean.conner@gmail.com
- Subject
- XXXXXXXXXX - Registration Inquiry
- Date
- Mon, 2 Dec 2024 08:42:38 -0800 (PST)
847-XXXXXXXX
Ref:XXXXXXXXXXX
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE This message and any included attachments are from XXXXXX Corporation and are intended only for the addressee. The information contained in this message is confidential and may constitute inside or non-public information under international, federal, or state securities laws. Unauthorized forwarding, printing, copying, distribution, or use of such information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the addressee, please promptly delete this message and notify the sender of the delivery error by e-mail or you may call XXXXXX's corporate offices in Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.A at (+1) (816)XXXXXXXX.
And that's it. It's lucky there was no personal information included or this company could be in violation of HIPAA.
On a whim, instead of simply deleting the email and going on with my life, I decided to do The Right Thing™, and inform the sender (which was the company itself) of the delivery error by calling the given phone number.
It took several calls to resolve. No one at XXXXXX knew how to directly handle my call. Two people I talked to attempted to transfer me to what they felt was the appropriate department, only to have the transfer fail and I had to call back and navigate the automated phone system yet again (in which I had to listen carefully, becauese the options had changed on October 20th; a refreshing change from the “recently changed” most such systems claim).
The final person still had no idea how to handle the call, but they put me on hold, talked to what they thought was the appropriate department, and it was resolved.
And yes, it was a Sean Conner to whom the message was intended—not just this Sean Conner.
The only thing I want to say is to corporations who have a similiar message—if you are going to bother putting a phone number to inform of email delivery errors, you may want to make an option that is obvious who handles such situations. Or just don't bother with a phone number at all. Or just say something like “just delete this and move on with your life. We don't care enough to handle this properly,” unlike the other email I received today from another medical company which had an email address I could send a notification to.
Sheesh.
A real real-time chess board
Two years ago I talked about a spherical chess variant. Now, I want to mention real time chess, where players can move their pieces at will, with the only limit being once a piece is moved, you can't move it for five seconds. And there's no check or checkmate—you win by capturing the opponent's king.
The problem with real time chess is that you really can't play it on a real board, since you would have to trust the other player not to move a piece immedately after moving it (and the other player would have to trust you to do the same). That is, unless you have a special chess set built just for the game. It's a cool set—the board and all the pieces are metal, with each square having an electromagnet to hold the piece down, and LED lighting to indicate when a piece can and can't move. But no mention of the cost—it's probably one of those “if you have to ask, you can't afford it” type things.
