Boys should have manly names that lend themselves easily to short nicknames, like "Mike," "Bill," "Joe" and "Alex." Avoid showoff literary or mythological references - "Heathcliff," "Castor," "Roland," etc. Just because you went into decades of debt in student loans to sit around for four years at a pricey college and read books is no reason to take it out on your child.
Don't name a boy "Sean" or "Connor" if the most Celtic thing in his life is Irish Spring.
Olde Englishe names are also stupid. I mean, "Percival?" People who do this should be hitte wyth plankes.
If you're an 'ethnic' White, use English spellings. "Henry," not "Heinrich." "Steven," not "Etienne." "Charles," not "Karl."
If you're Black and want to Keep It Real, at least talk to someone who actually speaks an African language before you name your son after the Swahili word for fencepost. Also, avoid deliberately misspelling the name - Daymon, Danyel etc. - because you think it makes him "special." It doesn't. It makes him look like his parents can't spell.
If you do want your son to feel special, do not name him exactly after his father and then "Jr" or Roman-Numeral him. A 10 year old kid named "Richard Theodore Warburton IV" might as well have HIT ME branded on his forehead as far as his peers are concerned.
As for religious names - all Old Testament names are grandfathered in, as are Saints' names if you're Catholic, but explicitly religious names should be otherwise avoided unless you're a devotee of the religion and the religion endorses such things. Whatever the case, anyone naming his son "Siddhartha Williams" should hear the sound of one hand slapping him.
Showing posts with label people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label people. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2008
Tech Support Sucks
It's been my experience that calling tech support is an exercise in futility. There seem to be only a handful of people at any given "support" center who actually know what they're doing, and good luck getting one of them on the phone.
I cannot recall how many times I've been given troubleshooting suggestions that were either totally irrelevant or just plain wrong.
Nothing makes my day like having a computer problem, calling tech support long distance on my phone bill, waiting half an hour - or longer - to talk with someone and then realizing I know more than he does.
What people need to remember is that these support centers are often run by a contracted company and not Dell, HP or whoever and get paid less for a return call on the same 'incident' than a new call for a new problem.
They therefore have the explicit objective to take as many new calls as possible and then dispose of them as soon as possible; the old "churn and burn." The last thing they want to do is to take the time and effort to seriously and methodically troubleshoot your technical problem.
This is why so much tech support "advice" comes down to R & R (Reformat drives & Reinstall software). They know this will take a long time and force you to get off the phone so they can take (and bill) the next call. Also, neutron bomb measures like R & R probably will solve most problems, so you won't be calling back (even though, if you think about it, you never did learn what was wrong or how to avoid it in the future).
Now, increasingly, we have the problem of tech support being farmed out to non-English speaking countries. On a recent call, I spoke to Vishnapranyahursadanapol (I think) who seemed like very nice guy - SEEMED like, I say, because I literally couldn't understand one thing he said.
I have an ear for languages and I'm VERY comfortable with accents, folks. If I can't understand someone, then he just cannot speak clear English. Period.
I cannot recall how many times I've been given troubleshooting suggestions that were either totally irrelevant or just plain wrong.
Nothing makes my day like having a computer problem, calling tech support long distance on my phone bill, waiting half an hour - or longer - to talk with someone and then realizing I know more than he does.
What people need to remember is that these support centers are often run by a contracted company and not Dell, HP or whoever and get paid less for a return call on the same 'incident' than a new call for a new problem.
They therefore have the explicit objective to take as many new calls as possible and then dispose of them as soon as possible; the old "churn and burn." The last thing they want to do is to take the time and effort to seriously and methodically troubleshoot your technical problem.
This is why so much tech support "advice" comes down to R & R (Reformat drives & Reinstall software). They know this will take a long time and force you to get off the phone so they can take (and bill) the next call. Also, neutron bomb measures like R & R probably will solve most problems, so you won't be calling back (even though, if you think about it, you never did learn what was wrong or how to avoid it in the future).
Now, increasingly, we have the problem of tech support being farmed out to non-English speaking countries. On a recent call, I spoke to Vishnapranyahursadanapol (I think) who seemed like very nice guy - SEEMED like, I say, because I literally couldn't understand one thing he said.
I have an ear for languages and I'm VERY comfortable with accents, folks. If I can't understand someone, then he just cannot speak clear English. Period.
An Internet Forum Bestiary
Here are some personalities (perhaps "poses" would be a better word) that I am tired of seeing online.
The Rebels
Rebels think themselves wise or good simply because they take a position contrary to whatever the majority of a given group thinks about something, when their thinking is nothing but the photo-negative of conformity. Look for this whenever someone tells you he's a "free thinker," "alternative" or whatever. Remember: Even if you do march to a different drummer, you're still marching.
The Instantly Cool
ICs imagine that coolness (733tn3zz, "cred," etc.) is something that can purchased or otherwise acquired from some third party or by aping the beliefs, dress, manner or lifestyle of some subculture. It has apparently never occured to them that the minute, I mean the very second, you consciously mold yourself into something that is not authentically you in pursuit of approval from others, coolness is gone. A costume is a costume, whether it's a grey flannel suit or the pierced/punk thrift store look.
The Xenophiles
Xenos admire something in direct proportion to how "different" it is to what they're used to, reflecting very little (or not at all) on whether or not it's actually any good, or even if they actually like it. They are, as W. S. Gilbert put it in The Mikado: "The idiot who praises, in enthusiastic tone Every century but this, and every country but his own..."
The Internet Nostalgists
INs wax on endlessly about the "good old days" before the Internet "went capitalist" and "sold out" by allowing commercial activity. To hear these people (old, bitter Unix snobs, mostly) talk about this supposed Golden Online Age, you'd think it was some utopia of Cool, Tech-Savvy people doing Smart and Clever Things - sort of a cross between the Bloomsbury group and Xerox PARC. Well, I was there, in college in the late '80s; the pre-Web, pre-spam, pre-public days of the NSF/Internet - which was supposedly so exalted over the hoi polloi and their vulgar wasteland of dial-in BBSes, GEnie, etc. And folks... then as now, the 'Net community was a very mixed bag. All the personal and social pathologies were already evident.
The Politically Incorrect
PIs are a subset of Rebels; people who think that hypersensitive "PC" sanctimony on the part of others authorizes or even requires them to talk like actual racists, misogynists, gay bashers, etc. (I'm not denying the blight of "PC" on American culture; it's all too real. But we're not going to get past it by confirming the worst fears of the "PC" more-sensitive-than-thou types, even if we are kidding as we do it.) "Look! I'm being gratuitously offensive! People are, like, UPSET with me! I'm a RADICAL!"
The Pseudo-Illuminati
The Pseudos are obsessed with having the Inside Track on something - Hell, anything - because it makes them feel "special." This manifests itself in two principal ways:
1) Obscurantism: The more marginal and "weird" something is, the better. The more people who know about it, the more it should be shunned. (Reference the earlier Xenophiles, as well as the frequently-observed phenomenon of people hating any music band that gains an appreciable audience.)
2) Arrogant Exclusion: How many of us have run into these "If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you" types? Nothing makes them happier than to litter their conversations with allusions to books, movies or songs that few people have heard of. Yet if you ask, "That sounds interesting, where can I check that out?" they either go stone silent or change the subject.
The reason, of course, is the same one behind calling them Pseudo-Illuminati; they're not really In The Know at all. They've never made any original aesthetic or intellectual discoveries... they got it all second-hand. Someone else told them about this book, that movie or some odd style of music, which means - GASP! - that they, too, were once Out Of The Loop.
Honestly, I don't know who they think they're fooling. We all learn about pretty much everything second-hand. Take a song, for example - unless you wrote the damned thing yourself, you heard about it from others who got there first. "No biggie," as we used to say. Ah, but for the Pseudos, it is a biggie because it reveals them to be just like the rest of us rather than Ascended Masters of Hipness. They would rather die than admit there was a point in their lives - perhaps quite recent - when they had no idea who Warren Zevon was, had never seen a David Lynch movie and thought H. R. Giger made wristwatches.
The Rebels
Rebels think themselves wise or good simply because they take a position contrary to whatever the majority of a given group thinks about something, when their thinking is nothing but the photo-negative of conformity. Look for this whenever someone tells you he's a "free thinker," "alternative" or whatever. Remember: Even if you do march to a different drummer, you're still marching.
The Instantly Cool
ICs imagine that coolness (733tn3zz, "cred," etc.) is something that can purchased or otherwise acquired from some third party or by aping the beliefs, dress, manner or lifestyle of some subculture. It has apparently never occured to them that the minute, I mean the very second, you consciously mold yourself into something that is not authentically you in pursuit of approval from others, coolness is gone. A costume is a costume, whether it's a grey flannel suit or the pierced/punk thrift store look.
The Xenophiles
Xenos admire something in direct proportion to how "different" it is to what they're used to, reflecting very little (or not at all) on whether or not it's actually any good, or even if they actually like it. They are, as W. S. Gilbert put it in The Mikado: "The idiot who praises, in enthusiastic tone Every century but this, and every country but his own..."
The Internet Nostalgists
INs wax on endlessly about the "good old days" before the Internet "went capitalist" and "sold out" by allowing commercial activity. To hear these people (old, bitter Unix snobs, mostly) talk about this supposed Golden Online Age, you'd think it was some utopia of Cool, Tech-Savvy people doing Smart and Clever Things - sort of a cross between the Bloomsbury group and Xerox PARC. Well, I was there, in college in the late '80s; the pre-Web, pre-spam, pre-public days of the NSF/Internet - which was supposedly so exalted over the hoi polloi and their vulgar wasteland of dial-in BBSes, GEnie, etc. And folks... then as now, the 'Net community was a very mixed bag. All the personal and social pathologies were already evident.
The Politically Incorrect
PIs are a subset of Rebels; people who think that hypersensitive "PC" sanctimony on the part of others authorizes or even requires them to talk like actual racists, misogynists, gay bashers, etc. (I'm not denying the blight of "PC" on American culture; it's all too real. But we're not going to get past it by confirming the worst fears of the "PC" more-sensitive-than-thou types, even if we are kidding as we do it.) "Look! I'm being gratuitously offensive! People are, like, UPSET with me! I'm a RADICAL!"
The Pseudo-Illuminati
The Pseudos are obsessed with having the Inside Track on something - Hell, anything - because it makes them feel "special." This manifests itself in two principal ways:
1) Obscurantism: The more marginal and "weird" something is, the better. The more people who know about it, the more it should be shunned. (Reference the earlier Xenophiles, as well as the frequently-observed phenomenon of people hating any music band that gains an appreciable audience.)
2) Arrogant Exclusion: How many of us have run into these "If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you" types? Nothing makes them happier than to litter their conversations with allusions to books, movies or songs that few people have heard of. Yet if you ask, "That sounds interesting, where can I check that out?" they either go stone silent or change the subject.
The reason, of course, is the same one behind calling them Pseudo-Illuminati; they're not really In The Know at all. They've never made any original aesthetic or intellectual discoveries... they got it all second-hand. Someone else told them about this book, that movie or some odd style of music, which means - GASP! - that they, too, were once Out Of The Loop.
Honestly, I don't know who they think they're fooling. We all learn about pretty much everything second-hand. Take a song, for example - unless you wrote the damned thing yourself, you heard about it from others who got there first. "No biggie," as we used to say. Ah, but for the Pseudos, it is a biggie because it reveals them to be just like the rest of us rather than Ascended Masters of Hipness. They would rather die than admit there was a point in their lives - perhaps quite recent - when they had no idea who Warren Zevon was, had never seen a David Lynch movie and thought H. R. Giger made wristwatches.
At the Movies
At what point, exactly, did people become incapable of distinguishing public movie theaters from their own living rooms?
The trash. The cell phones and pagers. The non-stop talking. And just try to get the theater staff to do something about it. I feel compelled to point out that as a paying theater customer, I should not have to police the goddamned place.
This sorry state of affairs has two causes:
1) Theater owners simply don't care if you have a lousy time, as long as no one makes any noise about it. Once they've got your $9 they could care less about your movie-watching experience. Multiplex theaters are little better than human cattle yards; get 'em lined up, sell 'em snacks, stuff 'em in the seats for 90 mins and then move 'em out to make space for the next herd.
2) People are getting worse. There is almost no such thing as a well-mannered group anymore. I'm not saying we all have to love each other, but apparently the idea that we should not harass or interfere with each other has also gone by the boards.
Whenever I confront people in theaters and ask them to keep it quiet or control their children - I'm always civil - they respond with undisguised shock; the very IDEA of a stranger asking them to control their actions or exercise any level of awareness and consideration of others in the theater leaves them sputtering with self-righteous anger.
Personally, I blame the 1960s. Why? Well, the 60s established several toxic ideas, still with us today:
There is something unhealthy and oppressive about self-restraint and public manners.
Young people are wiser, more ethical and just plain BETTER than older people.
Being "old fashioned" or a "square" is worse than being the most antisocial libertine.
Now, some of these ideas are centuries old - Rousseau's "les hommes naturel," etc. - but it was in the 60s that they took control of the American culture and public mind, and we are seeing the results... at the movies.
The trash. The cell phones and pagers. The non-stop talking. And just try to get the theater staff to do something about it. I feel compelled to point out that as a paying theater customer, I should not have to police the goddamned place.
This sorry state of affairs has two causes:
1) Theater owners simply don't care if you have a lousy time, as long as no one makes any noise about it. Once they've got your $9 they could care less about your movie-watching experience. Multiplex theaters are little better than human cattle yards; get 'em lined up, sell 'em snacks, stuff 'em in the seats for 90 mins and then move 'em out to make space for the next herd.
2) People are getting worse. There is almost no such thing as a well-mannered group anymore. I'm not saying we all have to love each other, but apparently the idea that we should not harass or interfere with each other has also gone by the boards.
Whenever I confront people in theaters and ask them to keep it quiet or control their children - I'm always civil - they respond with undisguised shock; the very IDEA of a stranger asking them to control their actions or exercise any level of awareness and consideration of others in the theater leaves them sputtering with self-righteous anger.
Personally, I blame the 1960s. Why? Well, the 60s established several toxic ideas, still with us today:
There is something unhealthy and oppressive about self-restraint and public manners.
Young people are wiser, more ethical and just plain BETTER than older people.
Being "old fashioned" or a "square" is worse than being the most antisocial libertine.
Now, some of these ideas are centuries old - Rousseau's "les hommes naturel," etc. - but it was in the 60s that they took control of the American culture and public mind, and we are seeing the results... at the movies.
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