Archives in Category: Annoyances

Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

September 11

Posted on September 16, 2011

I’ve been stewing about something since last weekend’s tenth anniversary of September 11. I told Earl, and he said I was probably the only person on the planet who thought this mattered. I was undeterred.

In fact, I wrote a

 … finish reading September 11

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Google-de-gook

Posted on August 15, 2011

I want to start lobbying for the Word of the Year for 2013. And I hope Ben Zimmer, whom I wrote about a few days ago, is paying attention. Even if he isn’t I think my word has merit. It’s

 … finish reading Google-de-gook

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Quality and Training Purposes

Posted on November 14, 2010

It’s that time of year when I order many Christmas gifts from catalogs, and I’m always torn between doing it via the Internet or via the phone.

The Internet provides an opportunity to order items without interacting with another human.

 … finish reading Quality and Training Purposes

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Coming Soon

Posted on August 2, 2010

I opened my bookkeeping program, Quickbooks Online, this morning to find the following message: COMING SOON.

Usually when I see this message I’m interested. It means a new restaurant is arriving shortly or a new movie is about to

 … finish reading Coming Soon

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ConEd

Posted on July 22, 2010

This is the third day I’ve tried to contact a human being at the electric company. Maybe there are no human beings at the electric company anymore. All I get is one of those annoying automated messages telling me the

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Face Off

Posted on October 29, 2008

In the past seven days, I’ve been to New York and back. I had tales to tell and ideas to spew forth on the Internet. But I was waylaid by a very strange experience, at least strange to me.

Over

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I Found an Intelligent Human at AT&T

Posted on October 2, 2008

I have been in more contact with ATT these past five days than I’d like. But there has been a problem with my phone service for almost three weeks, and I needed to resolve it. Knowing how telephone companies are,

 … finish reading I Found an Intelligent Human at AT&T

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Unattended Children

Posted on September 30, 2008

It’s probably a sign of my age, but whenever I see children in public these days they seem quite unruly. For instance, Earl and I dined at a local establishment a while back, where we saw youngsters running around while

 … finish reading Unattended Children

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Locker Logic

Posted on August 15, 2008

If you belong to a health club, have you ever noticed how lockers are dispensed? Usually you check in with an attendant somewhere to obtain a key or a number or some indicator of what locker is yours that day.

 … finish reading Locker Logic

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Dinner with Children

Posted on June 23, 2008

A couple nights ago Earl and I went to a nice restaurant, the type that would be called “white tablecloth” even though it was trendier than that and didn’t have tablecloths at all. But there were cloth napkins and pillows

 … finish reading Dinner with Children

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