Darfuria

It has been a little while since I have posted anything, and an even longer while since I have posted anything worth reading, so I thought I’d have a bit of a rant about the things that are getting to me right now.

Idioms. I fucking hate idioms. Even the definition of the word idiom is stupid:

“An idiom is an expression, that is a term or phrase whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions and the arrangement of its parts, but refers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through common use.”

When someone is explaining something, and they finish with “it’s easy as pie!”, it just makes we want to destroy their teeth. How is pie easy? What about pie is easy? That doesn’t even make sense!

If you have been reading for a while, you’ll know that I had a couple of job interviews lately at some website development companies. One of them was fantastic, and unfortunately I didn’t get it, which I was a little disappointed at. The other, however, was a complete shambles. My input was fine, the interview went well. However, the manager completely forgot I was coming, so I had to sit around for thirty minutes and wait for him to prepare some work for me to do, and nobody else in the sausage-fest office even bothered saying hi.

At one point I called one of them over to ask him a question, and he was a complete condescending prick. One of the other guys actually lost his arse in the abnoxiousness. Seriously, he was about eleven feet tall, and if you stood him against a wall you’d be able to draw a perfectly straight line. Man, they were a bunch of idiots. I didn’t even hear back from the agent who was obsessing over the position. Fuck them.

I was contacted about a technical support position earler, by one of those typical over-bubbly females that works for a recruitment agency. You know, the kind that wake you up at 10am with a “HELLO THIS IS MARY SPEAKING, I AM CALLING WITH REGARDS TO THE POSITION YOU ENQUIRED ABOUT, DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE!?” that has every inflection known to man and cat. After the delightful phone call we had, she e-mailed me about the position, and I replied. Amongst my reply was the following:

“Also, what sort of technical support would the successful candidate be offering? I’m assuming it’s IT support, but it appears to be a little vague.”

To which she replied:

“Dealing with technical support from Toshiba customers.”

I sat there thinking “did I not just say that it was vague!? You could have at least said you don’t know instead of repeating what your stupid Word document says, you idiot. Can you actually read, or are your eyes just engulfed in that mocking happiness you spew down the phone to unemployed people who were happily sleeping? In fact, do you even know who Toshiba are? In fact! Your reply is completely illegitimate! I’m going to be dealing with technical support from Toshiba customers? What!?”

Is not being able to use a camera part of the job requirement to work at a letting agency? Have you ever looked for properties online? Not only do all of letting agents’ website developers completely suck, and restrict image sizes to stupid dimensions, but nobody can even take good photos of properties anymore. I’m half tempted to make a website titled “Exeter Property Pictures” and offer to go around and take pictures of all of the properties available to rent or buy. I mean, for fuck sake, Google will give you however many gigabytes of free space. What’s with all of these 300×300px images of the outside of a property that might not even be the one available? Idiots.

Why do people feel the need to touch a monitor when they’re pointing at something? If anything it makes the thing you’re pointing at harder to see, because your fucking finger is covering it! IF I TOUCH IT THEY’LL KNOW WHAT I MEAN SMUDGE SMUDGE SMUDGE.

The things people say and do on Facebook make me wonder how people manage to butter their toast in the morning. I’m not going to go into a huge list of stupidity, but this is something that one of my friends wrote on another of my friends’ wall:

Im guessing your not Gyming it with me 2nite? Il be there at 6.10, see you there!!!!

I’m not even going to bother taking that apart. Just reading it makes me want to tear off my eyelids.

A short while the wall broke my mobile phone, which was the result of a lapse of momentary rage; it happens. Due to the lack of money to afford an iPhone, I had to go on a bit of a hunt for a cheap phone. Part of me was tempted to re-buy the phone I had, but instead I chose the Nokia 2760.

I honestly dislike phones that have a stupid amount of features. When I have a phone I like to have a phone that makes it easy to call and text people, and store information. I’m not bothered about listening to the radio, having a camera or storing MP3s - all of that is functionality for a different device that I’d spend money on to get the quality.

Anyway, the 2760 seemed like a nice phone. It had an appealing battery life, and only set me back about £30 from O2, which was a nice deal. However, after using it for a while it has come to my attention that this phone was clearly manufactured for mentally and physically incapable bastards.

The amount of times I’ll be typing a text, and accidentally hit send or save because of the poor button layout, or I’ll be typing a text message and have to go back and re-type words simply because the software can’t keep up with the speed that I move my thumbs is unbelievable. Perhaps it’s because I type my texts in proper English, and the developers were incapable of forseeing that as a situation that would ever occur in SMS messaging.

Another thing that is really irritating is how it manages to fail at a simple task, such as the address book. A useful feature is to be able to have groups of contacts. I like my address book to be organised, and use it properly, so that contacts have multiple numbers, etc. I also like to use peoples’ full names so that I know exactly which Sam “Sam” could be. Obviously that level of organisation gets a bit messed up when you have contacts such as “Mum” and “Dad” amongst “Andy Williams” and other such people, so naturally you should be able to create a group of contacts. However, instead of simply having a group within your address book where you can store more contacts, the contacts have to exist in the address book and in the group, which practically renders organisation completely pointless.

I really don’t understand how a team of developers and engineers can work so hard on a product that is supposed to be simple to use and understand, and fail so hard. Why do these people come across as so detached from how people really are, and how they behave. Why are they so incapable of producing a product that is actually simple to use?

Fail.

It’s so annoying when you’re talking to someone online, and the word they’re trying to spell is right there infront of them, and yet, after many attempts, they still don’t get it! Whether this is on an online game, or even an IM client, people seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that a person who can obviously spell the word correctly has just spelt the word totally correctly, and yet they continue to spell it wrong! What the hell!? I mean, if this is happening on IM clients all the time then it makes you wonder; ‘do people even bother reading messages properly?’.

Edit

I wonder how many people can actually spell “Saturday” and “Sunday”. Purely because you get practice at spelling the rest of the days of the week when you’re in school. I bet a lot of people spell “Saturday”, “Wednesday” and “February” wrong. February simply because a lot of people spell it: “Febuary”, and Wednesday because a lot of people spell it: “Wendsday”.

You know, this is equally annoying as the screen shaking, because usually when I don’t want to talk to someone I’ll close the conversation, and then I get the MSN popup window near the taskbar saying “(Insert Name) has sent you a nudge”, thus almost rendering “Disable Nudges” pointless. Honestly Microsoft, I disabled them because I don’t want to hear a damn thing about them.

I think everytime someone sends a nudge on MSN, some poor software developer at Microsoft should have a boxing glove appear from his pitiful Windows screen and mash him in the face, leaving “Microsoft” printed in his face, just so that he can feel humiliated.

Edit: Wait… That’d give me a reason to enable them… Nice idea, though.