jcole’s weblog

This is a new master category for all the different types of quotes.

There’s a perfectly good word that should be used more than it is in America. The word I have in mind is “mind”. As in, “mind the step”, “mind the gap”, “mind your children” and many other useful phrases you’ll hear in England.

This comes to my attention because I have heard the following spoken several times onboard Southwest Airlines planes:

Flight Attendant: We’ll now be turning the lights back up, so watch your eyes.

How, exactly, does one watch their eyes? This is exactly the case where America’s usage of “watch” instead of “mind” completely breaks down. Forget, for a moment, the mental picture of someone staring intently at a step, merely following the directions on the “watch the step” sign. In this case it not only makes no sense, it’s impossible to actually watch your own eyes.

Come on, Southwest. Mind your eyes.

A new category, for your reading enjoyment: Pedantry!

Adrienne knows I’m pedantic, I know I’m pedantic. This is where all types of pedantic things will go.

On a Southwest flight from Cleveland to Las Vegas we had a stop in Nashville. One of the passengers that got on in Nashville left me with this nugget which I won’t soon forget:

Guy: Y’all aint seen nobody wid a towel on they head, ‘av ya?
Me: *blank, disbelieving stare*
Guy: Ah, OK just lemme know if you do.

He then proceeded to take up at least 4 inches of my personal space for the entire duration of a four-hour flight. That, however, is another story.

I got a new camera from the Yahoo internal “For Sale” list. I got a really good deal on a great camera.

Expect to see some fun pictures up soon.

I added a new category, “HOTCW”, or “Heard over the cubicle wall”.

This is where I will place things heard at work. Nothing confidential of course. To start out:

Guy1: Pole Dancing is an Olympic sport now, you know.
Guy2: Really?
Guy3: No, that’s Pole VAULTING.

According to the people at Orientation, Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus, where I am working, is running at 100% capacity at the moment. This leads to some funny situations:

We’re sitting at a table having a nice lunch, we’re finished eating, so we get up. This leaves three available seats. Immediately, before we’ve even walked away from the table there are three people right there, taking our seats.

Seat vultures.

T-Mobile is the subject of today’s rant.

Today at about 7:30pm, we arrived at a T-Mobile store in Cupertino, CA with a few goals in mind:

• Get Adrienne a new phone, somehow attached to my account so that we get one bill.
• Disable the automatic credit card payments for my phone.
• Change the phone into my name and remove all traces of MySQL as a company from my account.
• Update my billing address to my new address in California.
• Maybe get a new 408 phone number for my phone.
• Not end up with my phone on a new one year contract (mine expires at the end of December). I don’t like unnecessary contracts.

Seems easy enough? A simple list of things to accomplish. More than an hour and a half later, we leave the store pissed off with only the first of them accomplished. Adrienne has a new phone, that’s all we got done.

Every single other thing in that list has to be done by a different person/department within T-Mobile, and none of them communicate with each other. None of them could tell me which order we should do them in.

To top it all off, apparently I cannot transfer the account to my own name without extending my contract another year, or starting a new one year contract. Weren’t the contracts in place only to ensure that subsidizing the phone is a profitable thing for the carrier? If I already have a phone, why require a contract to give me service? It doesn’t cost them anything to add my account to their system… in this case I’m already there, I just want to put it under my own name…

UGH. Part deux: When I change to a 408 number, my old 931 number is just dropped from their system… no forwarding, no please-call-408 message, nothing. So all of my calls from people who haven’t got my new number are just dropped, sent to the this-number-doesn’t-work message. How’s that for customer service? This is 2004, guys.

When I mentioned to the sales person that I barely got any service at my apartment in San Jose, her only suggestion was that that was normal and that I should forward my calls to my home phone while I’m at home. How’s that for customer service? She doesn’t have any way to note “bad service” areas, no suggestion other than to just give my money to another phone company… they apparently don’t want it and would rather that SBC have it. The downside is of course, I don’t have a landline phone, and don’t intend to get one. I’ll be looking into car antennas, nice big ones… maybe I can mount it on my apartment window.

To be fair: The rep in the store was very nice, very energetic, and really tried to help me. It’s not her fault that the company has such stupid processes.

End rant.

We are now set up in our new apartment. Everything is good!

In case you have web sites hosted on my server, the new IP address is 24.23.186.63. Enjoy!

I will post about the trip down and put the pictures up after my first day at Yahoo!