Appassionato

Monotonous + rigid = professional?

Categorised as Rants & tagged with language.

Have you ever noticed that in an attempt to sound “pro­fes­sional”, perhaps, things come out mono­ton­ous and rigid?

Let’s look at dic­tion­ar­ies. Why is it that they always expect you to go round and round until you find your answer? Back in school, I remember teachers always telling us that a defin­i­tion answer should not contain the word we were asked to define. And yet, the first defin­i­tion you find in a dic­tion­ary often gives you no answer at all. Taking an example…¹

pruden­tial adj. 1. Arising from or char­ac­ter­ized by prudence.

prudence n. 1. The state, quality, or fact of being prudent.

(and finally…)

prudent adj. 1. Wise in handling practical matters; exer­cising good judgment or common sense.

But I’ve seen worse…

chancery n., pl. -ies. 1. a. A court of chancery. b. The pro­ceed­ings and practice of a court of chancery; equity.

…

Anywho, I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for until I scrolled half-way down the page.

Aside from dic­tion­ar­ies, call centres piss me off. I was trying to call the Inland Revenue Depart­ment (gov­ern­ment tax agency) to ask about a little question that took two minutes to resolve. But I was having to hold on to the phone for at least twenty minutes while com­plain­ing about it on MSN.

First I get some annoying music, then suddenly it stops and I think “Ooooh it’s coming”, then it switches to some Maori song. That probably happened six or seven times until I got another stop. I heard someone say “Hi” so I said “Hi”, and the robotic, mono­ton­ous voice says “… Thanks for holding on the line…” By this time, I felt really stupid I was talking to a robot and the robot babbles on but not too long after­wards, the same robot says “You’re speaking with ******, how may I help you?” It was then natural for me to hesitate and process through my head whether they decided to name their robots or was I finally lucky enough to hear a human being (despite her sounding like a robot). A quick tempta­tion came to me, prodding me to ask her, “Are you a robot?” But I wasn’t rude enough to do so.

It’s this thing with bur­eau­cracy. Everything needs to be in order, I suppose there’s good and bad sides to it, but then sometimes you wait so long for someone to answer your call, and they direct you to a different depart­ment, then another depart­ment, then another and another. Essen­tially, you walk in circles, again.

I can’t really blame them though. It’s a common per­cep­tion to most, if not all of us that pro­fes­sion­al­ism is defined by monotone and rigidity. All the inform­a­tion, Terms of Service and policies in “pro­fes­sional” busi­nesses are written in straight, rigid tone. Do most people even read them?

On a side note, I finally got my Internet bandwidth uncapped!

1. Sourced from Answers.com. [↩]

Damned businessmen

Categorised as Internet, Rants & tagged with Internet, shopping.

Dammit. I busted my monthly Internet bandwidth. Again.

Some of you in the nice Northern Hemi­sphere may be thinking “WTF Internet bandwidth” but yeah, that’s right. Telecom Xtra is the monopoly over our broadband Internet here and we get crap service at high prices. The plan we’re with gives 6 GB Internet bandwidth at the damned rate of $49.95 NZD ($36.00 USD) a month, not to mention we have one of the slowest broadband speeds in the OECD already.

Neither my sister nor I know what we did to suddenly bust the 6 GB bandwidth just four days before the recurring date but right now I’m having to suffer 56K dial-up speed. I can’t even load my site properly in Mozilla Firefox. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can’t load any page properly in Firefox so I’m back to Opera again. It’s killing me.

I had always been com­plain­ing about the crap broadband speed we got – about 150~200 KB/s down­load­ing from most sites – but now I under­stand what real pain-in-the-arse means. Last night, I was down­load­ing a file at 4 KB/s. The second file I down­loaded was pro­gress­ing at 0.5 KB/s. All this is due to the bloody rich firm that provides the bad service. They have no com­pet­i­tion to face in the industry so it doesn’t matter what price they set or what service they give, we all have to pay them. Die.

And to add to all the slow Internet killing my mood, I acci­dent­ally bidded on a 1 GB MP4 player on TradeMe when I thought it was a 2 GB. It wasn’t purely my fault since that auction came up in the search results when I entered “2GB MP4 player”. Anyhow, I won that at $57 NZD and realised I made a mistake fighting over it with another bidder. I then went after the 2 GB one I really wanted and won it at $59 NZD. Yeah. $2 for 1 GB upgrade. I should laugh? Heee. But, no.

It was the same seller that listed the items and I mailed him straight after­wards asking if we could please cancel the trade and I would be willing to pay any costs he had incurred in listing the auction, which would amount to something no more than $3.95. And he replied me:

Please pay $10 (admin and restock­ing charge) to our bank account

“Admin and restock­ing charge” my ass. It was just a Chinese guy bringing cheap MP4 players in from China and reselling here for triple or quadruple the price and he’s charging a sixth of the item’s price for some admin and “restock­ing” crap. The item hasn’t even been dis­patched! I shall now give the 1 GB MP4 player to my friend who doesn’t have one since if I do resell the item, I don’t think I’d find another stupid girl who’d bid up to $57 for it thinking it was a 2 GB.

So now, I am broke again. But at least I’ll now treasure my 200 KB/s download speed to come in two days. (Perhaps only for a week in, though.)

History dug out

Categorised as Personal, Site-Related, Web-Related & tagged with Design.

When you look back at your old design works, do you feel proud seeing how much you have improved?

For­tu­nately, thanks to Internet Archive, I’ve found one of my favourite designs from the past. And unfor­tu­nately, I think I like it more than this current design. I shall enlighten you with a little snapshot: Version 12. How bad does it feel? To think that you designed better three years ago than now? But I’ll comfort myself by the fact that I have certainly improved in terms of layout access­ib­il­ity and coding. By the way, Version 11 had 46 header slices. I crown myself Queen of “Optim­isa­tion”.

So what were you like several years ago? According to Version 4, I was quite a little brat. You know, that type of attitude many 13 or 14-year-old girls roaming on the web has (I’m just being ste­reo­typ­ical here), which a lot of us probably despise of. The following proves self-explanatory:

Splash page:

Require­ments :+: CSS :: PHP :: 800 x 600+ :: IE 5.5 :: Sign Guestbook!

I then greet you all with a “Would you like to vote for my site at DNW Top 100?” pop-up. Surely, that earnt me a lot of votes! I mean really, it did. I also had a changing title bar! How cool is that? But the post on 14 July 2003 was “teh biatch”:

Watch out people… You skip the splash page I kill you…

Reason? I placed my OKcounter on the splash page. I wanted to see the numbers go up so skipping was a no-no! Attention-seeker. And I also had a “Wall of Shame”. Hee hee heee.

Forgive me, I was 13. I really want to know what I had on my ancient “Wall of Shame” and how I con­struc­ted my “Rules/FAQ”; but those pages were gone.

A while ago I also dug out my childhood diary and this was on the front page: (excuse the poor English, it was during my first year in NZ)

Date: 15.9.98

… some people get some letters from me. The letters inside, I had write somethings about Jenny was so bad, when after holidays, she came back to NZ, she didn’t have any friend can play with her, Ha! ha! because I’ll writing letter to everybody about she was very very bad…

Hey, how cool was that? Miss eight-year-old egghead. Incred­ibly cute though, the last pages of the diary were filled with my personal “love stories” from 2001. I wonder what I’ll think of myself now in a few years’ time?