Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread)

it is actually designed to fuck with us

motherfucking
yamgobblers
kiss
it

I have avoided the registered card/prepay thing, as it clearly doesnt work the way it should. I have a blank card and I just top it up at 7-11 or the station with random coinage every few days.

The readers being slow as shit is irritaing but I *have* noticed a little trick I have been meaning to try and get out to people: at station barriers, you dont actuall need to wait til the other person's finished going thru and the gate closes again before you tap the card on. You can do it right after they do! And the gate opens in half the time as a result! If everyone knew that it'd speed things up massively.

...the non-gate readers at suburban stations otoh are pieces of shit. FOr a whole week balaclava only had ONE machine working. When theres 45 people waiting to tap on and the train arrives, they just give up and tell you to get on the train without paying. Haha.

the first phase of the myki marketing campaign was all bright colours and happy fonts and stuff like 'myki is so great, everything is great with myki'

the second phase was the same happy colours and fonts but just telling you how not to tap on e.g. 'don't wave your card', ''don't double-tap your card', 'don't do this don't do that'

the third phase (i.e. now) is the same happy colours and fonts but the messages are 'you have to use myki now, suck it up'

i'm expecting phase four to be basically just 'fuck off dickhead' on posters

you dont actuall need to wait til the other person's finished going thru and the gate closes again before you tap the card on. You can do it right after they do!

oh god i'm too scared to try anything like this in case it fails

FOr a whole week balaclava only had ONE machine working.

that week suuuuuuucked

How do we never see each other at the station wtf

ikr

HAPPINESS IN MYKI

I would totally go for a trent reznor-themed myki campaign with pigs heads on sticks.

'you bring me closer to jordanville station'

I'm still confused about light switches in Australia, are they sideways? Push-buttons?

An entire nation of dimmer knobs?

coin-op?

They're like kangaroos, but they're reptiles, they is.

non-myki, but people who need to ask a lot of IMPORTANT and CHALLENGING questions at what should be the goddam end of the meeting

stop it

when you buy credit online, you have to wait for anything from one to four days before you can use it, and you don't actually know whether your purchase went through until you try to use it on public transport.

The CTA's touch pass system takes about 3-4 days for a payment to be useable if you start from $0. It used to be that if you tried to use your card before the funds were available, it would deactivate your account, then you'd have to call them, be chastised for jumping the gun, and wait another 3-4 days. I think they've changed it now, or maybe I just don't let my card lapse anymore.

For some reason, there is no 3-4 day waiting period if you pay in person at their offices.

It's not all bad though - their bumbling meant I got to ride for free from August through February b/c my unfunded card kept working.

and you don't actually know whether your purchase went through until you try to use it on public transport.

Waitup I didnt see this bit. adam you know theres those blue status machines you can use to see what the card's balance currently is and view usage history, right?

Also our light switches as stated above = down for on, up for off.

so cute, but such savages

What is the world-wide norm?

sun goes up, sun goes down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TboDmLD0ZU

It's in the Aussie toilets where you'll find the three seashells.

i get ia whenever someone says something like "that'd be a great band name!!"/"that's the name of my future band!" mostly cause the only bands who ever have names like that are jam bands that suck

think u joined post this excellent thread, zach Come Up With The Most Boring Band Name Possible

Chicago is on the verge of instituting a new payment system called Ventra that I fear is going to make Myki look like... something that works really well and isn't annoying at all.

Also bonus evil: the Ventra fare card also works as a pre-paid debit card with usurious hidden fees and is intentionally and specifically targeted to low income residents. One fee that was initially in place that they said they would remove (although they used some serious weasel language like, "At this time we will suspend this fee while we investigate the issue" or something shitty like that) is that if you call customer service for any reason, you will be charged $10 an hour for the call. So if the debit card side of Ventra fucks something up and you have to call about it, they will charge you more than many of the targeted cardholders make per hour to resolve it. And since Ventra makes money when you call CS, they have absolutely zero incentive not to constantly screw up the account.

It is truly a vile and rotten thing and as much as I love Chicago, it's taking up a lot of space in the "I don't want to live here anymore-o-meter."

On bad days, anyway. And gee thank goodness we're solidly middle class. Hmph.

The thing that's taking up space is the fact that the city leadership clearly hates low income residents. It's just so fucking hostile, you know? And short sighted and greedy (somebody is making money off this. It is not residents) and ignorant and infuriating. And wasteful! Chicago is broke as a joke and we already have a fare system in place that they just put into place what, seven years ago? It works. It's not perfect, but it works more than it doesn't so why replace it with this weird, gross, exploitive debit/fare card combo that requires the installation of all new equipment and is privatized so whatever profit it makes goes somewhere other than the city.

Man I'm in a mood today. Sorry y'all. I'm going to go take a walk or something.

Guess you'll have to since your fare cards don't work.

Ha!

Come to Seattle, we have lakes and l3gal w33d and no machine politics (so far as I've heard)

Remember the Go Lanes on the bus? That were supposed to allow people with Chicago Cards to board quickly. But then they never worked if someone else was using the regular fare box.

Do you know what is pissing me off??? Potential clients who call who cannot summarize the reason they are looking for a lawyer to something like, "I want a divorce," or "I was laid off and I need a lawyer to look at my severance agreement," or "pregnancy discrimination." I make very clear that I am not a lawyer and they will get to tell their whole story to a lawyer. GAh.asd;flkj A while back one caller (a "Professional" who should be able to communicate) gave a long account of her crappy commute -- riveting, but in now way irrelevant to why she was needed an attorney.

i've decided it's like a 15 minutes of fame/captive audience thing. I don't think they even KNOW the gist of their stories most of the time, it's just this incessant, infernal addiction to fking narrative

I really do understand that the problems they're dealing with may be overwhelming and they might have a hard time boiling things down, but I'm talking about the people who just can't succinctly convey that they want a plain old divorce. I'm not your fucking therapist! I'm sorry that you found lube in your husband's car and some other woman's jewelry in your bed, but really, I don't care at all.

Listening to them is like reading these long, plaintive posts of mine.

Actually, the older woman who found the lube was pretty entertaining. I started letting her talk and talk and talk while I did work b/c she would eventually say something APPALLING and HILARIOUS.

related to Je55e's: people who call my workplace before thinking about what they're calling for and how to express this need. so I have to listen to them verbally stall while they frame their thoughts.

wait why would you call a number if you don't even know why you're calling it?

EXACTLY

believing my ID is in my wallet and discovering that it is not and then not being able to find it right away. Not innocuous, but the anger is absolutely irrational.

people who call my workplace before thinking about what they're calling for and how to express this need.

Relatedly, people who call a place when they are utterly unprepared with the required details for the call. A young lass on the train the other morning rang her prepaid phone company to complain her credit wasnt working. AllI could hear her saying constantly was "well no, i dont know that... or that... I'm on a train I don thave that info... *says DOB/name*... I dunno I dont have that on me..." then she got shitty and hung up. I mean, come on lady!

(we have had callers to the ISP helpdesk wanting to go thru troubleshootign for their home DSL connection. While in a car. And driving it. And then they get snotty when you tell em a) pls stop the car youre breaking the law and b) ffs we cant troubleshoot something you arent in front of, GO AWAY.)

thing that makes me irrationally angry: when I have to put together a bunch of documents and mail them to a bunch of people. So many things can and do seem to go wrong. Tonight I almost had a nervous breakdown trying to get my name and direct line to line up with the letterhead (yes, we still use pre-printed letterhead in my office...), only to eventually realize that it kept going wrong because I had been using THREE SUBTLY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE LETTERHEAD that were ALL MIXED IN TOGETHER. And the docs were all in PDF/A so I couldn't combine them on the computer and had to print them separately to NEW pdfs. And when I finally put everything together I realized that it didn't all fit in the envelopes I had already printed labels for and labeled. etc.

ooh, here's one: my registration appointment for summer classes was this evening at 6pm. i leave class for a few minutes to go register at the computer out front. there is only one class that i'm interested in, so i log in to the system and enter the course code. i get sent to a screen telling me there is a hold on my student account because of an unpaid fee. i run back into the classroom, grab my debit card, and run back out to the computer. the fee is $150 -- ouch, but i pay it, and the hold is released. take two: i get to the "add" screen, enter the course code, and... the class is CLOSED, with no waiting list. it's the end of the month, i'm already low on cash, i'm out another $150 bucks, and i can't even register for the goddamn class. if they'd told me the class was closed ahead of time, i would have put off paying the outstanding fee until a time when i didn't feel so squeezed. i have a doctor's appointment tomorrow and a prescription to pick up and i haven't finished paying down my deductible, so that's gonna be another sock in the gut.

Yesterday the local newspaper published a special section on the top 250 players in the NFL draft, and a friend and I were going through it to see who had the longest name that might look comical squeezed onto a jersey. I came across one player whose short biography noted that his family "came to the US from Africa when he was a child." Oh, from "Africa," did they? Anyplace in particular? No, just throw a dart, it's all pretty much identical!

Yeah that's a persistently awful thing. Cf all of the ridiculous geographical mistakes being made during the Boston Marathon (Chechnya = Czech Republic = Turkey etc.)

We have the internet now!

Ordering a thing from amazon.com, then changing my mind 20 minutes later and trying to cancel the order. Then getting told "the order is shipping soon and we'll try to cancel it, but hey, we can only do our best here". Then hitting the cancel button again like 100 times and getting the same message. Feeling pretty confident that you've taken care of cancelling the fuck out of that order. Then getting a text message "Hey check it out, you're order has been shipped! : D"

HEY! FUCK. YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIUIUIIIIIIUUUUUUUUUUU.

sorry, also the text message is 6 hours later.

FUCKERS!

Waitup I didnt see this bit. adam you know theres those blue status machines you can use to see what the card's balance currently is and view usage history, right?

not on trams or buses

...fair point.