I recognize that bitching and moaning is not, strictly speaking, in the spirit of the season or whatever. Still, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some arbitrary date on which our Savior wasn’t even born stop me from delivering the fume and vitriol you’ve come to expect from me.

It has, again, been far too long (since August 10th, in fact) since I posted one of these, but this time I’m not gonna cop out and use that as one of the things… I’m just going to say it and explain that, well, bite me, I’ve been goddamn stressed out and busy.

1. I’VE BEEN GODDAMN STRESSED OUT AND BUSY : This isn’t appreciably different from normal, only way more so. Not so much the busy lately, because in truth I haven’t had much to fucking do because I’m waiting on another agency to fix some shit. But the stress doesn’t abate because deadlines are deadlines and curse curse CURSE.

2. STUPID VANITY PLATES : This came really close to just being “vanity plates” in toto, but I realized that there are two, maybe three, good ones out there, somewhere. Alas, this one, the one right here, below this line of text, does not qualify.

Oh, really? Michael Knight, is that you? Because I don’t recall K.I.T.T. having Tennessee Volunteers colored pom-poms in the back or, now that I think about it, being a friggin Altima. Nor was Michael Knight a weaselly looking twenty something in a button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Maybe you’re merely the NIGHT Rider. Riding around at night. That’s cool, I guess, but not cool enough to advertise it as your truncated, vowel-less, vehicular fucking MANIFESTO.

Or is it that you work for Knight-Ridder, and you’re all “Fuck you, Reuters! We’re number 1!” Meanwhile there’s some dude in a Magnum nearby with the “REUTRS1″ plate and sooner or later y’all are gonna meet up and there’s gonna be a cross-town, wire service slap fight and I don’t think you’ve got it in you to smack that Magnum driving badass, even if his company is second-rate. Also, you probably need to change it MCLTCHY or something… you guys got bought, yo, time to get with the present.

3. CARS WITH HID LAMPS : Look, I recognize that you feel safer when your headlights illuminate the whole fucking zip code as you drive, but the thing is, THEY’RE FRYING MY EYEBALLS OUT OF MY SKULL. I’ll flip the little switch thing on my rear view, which is nice except that now I don’t see shit except two little points of light that are still annoying.

And of course, that does nothing for the side view mirrors or the traffic that’s oncoming or on a side road. Christ, it’s like doing a drive-by on the Sun. The thing about night vision is that it works better if your eyes aren’t having to alternately strain and then be blinded. High contrast bad. So I’m glad you FEEL safe, but you’re making the roads LESS safe, and I want to shoot out your lights with this.

4. MY GLASSES ARE STILL FUCKING BROKEN : In my last installment — you know, the one about 4 months ago — I mentioned that my eyeglasses had gotten broken in Aikido class 2 weeks prior and I’d been too lazy to go get some new ones or repair them any further than just putting some bits of duct tape on there. Fast forward to right now. No change. Same glasses. In fact, fuck, it’s the same damn duct tape. I haven’t even changed that shit. I swear, it’s a good thing I’m a goddamn ninja at work.

5. THIS DOORKNOB :

which is on the stalls in the bathroom at my new building. I have a rule about bathrooms… well, actually, I have lots of rules about bathrooms, but one of them is to touch as little as possible, for as short a time as possible. I think it’s sensible, and I expect I won’t get much argument.

So enter this handle, which has to be the worst piece of industrial design since the Jart (that’s a brand of lawn dart and, yes, we owned some). Notice that it’s got heavy grooves to allow a good grip for rotation, only, rotating a knob whose sole purpose is to slide a small latch by a half of an inch doesn’t require a whole lot of torque, Philip (Philip is the fake name I’ve given to the designer who made this atrocity, since I don’t know who it was. Don’t feel bound by my convention though; call him Jack or Bob or Cap’n Shit-on-my-fingertips for all I care).

Notice that there are no grooves or scoring or knurling of any kind that might help in the pulling of the door closed and notice further that the whole thing is angled so that the diameter decreases as it gets further from the door. So this “knob” which is, we see now, more like just an adornment than a functional part of the door, is both smooth AND tapered the wrong way, making the act of gripping it in order to pull the door closed a tortuous act at best, requiring more effort than required by about 100 times. Worse still, since that’s basically fucking impossible, you have to close the door by pulling on the coat hanger or the (dusty and gross) top of the door itself while ALSO touching the knob so that you can latch the damn thing. This touching of two separate surfaces where one should suffice is clearly a violation of the rule stated above (and violates one other bathroom rule as well, which is that all stall doors must have “firmly closed” as their default state) and stands as an absolute archetype of shitty design. Philip, I hope all you get for Christmas is a dick in a box.

6. FUCKING THIEVING ASSHOLES : I was paying some bills two nights ago and found that, to my surprise, I couldn’t log into my web account at one of my credit card sites. Which is odd, because that’s how I always pay my bills and stuff. So I remember, belatedly, that I had tried to use this particular card (which I seldom use for anything) to buy a book online from a place that doesn’t take Amex, and it had gotten denied. So now I’m a bit freaked. A back story, see number 1 and allow me to sheepishly admit that I’m not the best about checking my statements when I start getting busy. I know I should, but i often just let my non-interesting mail pile up for a while. Anyway, I start tearing through my mail pile to find them and just decide, fuck it, I’ll call the company and see what’s going on. After a barrage of identity confirming questions asking if I’d ever lived in one of the following counties … and do you know a … and what’s your mother’s maiden name, etc. etc. I talk to a lady and she says (I paraphrase for dramatic effect), “So, you didn’t use a Credit Access Check to make a purchase from XXXX AUTO SALES on November XX for $7650?”

…

“Ahh, no, no I certainly did not.”
“Well, it would seem someone else got a hold of one of your checks.”
“Um, yeah, I’d say. I never use those checks and shred them whenever I encounter them.”
“Ok, k, we’ll go ahead and freeze that transaction and …”

and the rest is them handling it pretty much professionally. But, FUCK ME… eight grand on one of those high rate access checks, and I didn’t know for nearly two months. I’m a fucking moron. Some fucker must’ve swiped that shit from my old mailbox after I moved, but before the mail forwarding kicked in or something. In which case my thinking, lawyer though I am not, is that this probably a case of mail fraud as well as theft and misrepresentation and so on. I’ll be filing a police report, probably tomorrow, and I expect it will all work out (i.e. me not paying one dime of that nearly $8000) in the end. But let this serve as a warning, y’all… check those statements. And tell your credit card companies to stop sending those dangerous goddamn access checks.

Thursday, December 21st, 2006 @ 9:45 pm The Rage Report
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