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Government incompetence
I received a notice last week that I hadn't paid the tax for my company and I owed $70 in penalties. This had me fuming mad because I had a copy of the check I sent in March and the check was included in my tax return; how did the state process the tax return to know how much I owed without seeing the check? I called the Franchise Tax Board on Friday and spoke to a representative that said he'd send a note for the returns people to look for it (the check hadn't been cashed) and he'd give me a call back. Today is Tuesday and I never heard from him, so I called back. The problem with calling back is that the automated system wouldn't let me wait on hold because the system was too bogged down. So, 10 or so calls later, I got put on hold and then transferred to someone. The lady said that I needed to stop payment on the check (she didn't bother looking up my account), fax in a copy of the stop payment and send a new check. She didn't bother giving me the fax number.
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Drawing conclusions in bug reports
When I was become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), we were taught to observe and report without making a diagnosis, because we were not trained to do so. This concept also applies to bug reports. Over the years I've seen users/customers report bugs and attempt to say why the bug is happening. Unfortunately, many times the user is completely wrong. Without seeing the source code, knowing how things work, and/or not knowing a particular standard, it is nearly impossible to draw a conclusion as to why a problem is happening. I wish that bug reports would do what I was trained to do becoming an EMT; observe and report. Let the developers make the conclusions and fix the issue.
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Legos, Legos, Legos
My wife thinks I'm crazy being a 33 year old, married man wanting to play with Legos. Well, I have news for her...I AM crazy! In my effort to build up a Lego town, I've started looking for bulk Legos as the most cost effective way of getting random parts to build buildings and such. I've found some on eBay, but with shipping costs and having no idea what I'll get, I went to Craig's list and found some Legos yesterday. I bought a big box of them and have started sorting them to see what I got. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk in there. Junk being non-block parts and non-Lego parts. The non-Lego parts (some Mega Blocks) are far inferior to Legos in terms of quality. The process of sorting is very slow as I have to examine every part; most Lego parts say "Lego" right on the "stud". It is, however, in my nature to sort things like this. I figure another day or two and I'll have this box sorted and it will be time to find more.
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Awful service
My wife and I went to hear a jazz band at a local restaurant last night (the band lead is the head custodian at her school) with a few of her friends. Having been to this restaurant before to here this guy play before and having experienced awful server, not to mention mediocre, over-priced food, we made sure we ate dinner first (I even had a candy bar right before we left so I'd get my dessert in). So, we get there and a waitress didn't even come over to us to take our drink order for 30 minutes. Then the food order wasn't taken for another 20-30 minutes (I can't recall exactly). If that wasn't enough, the food arrived about 1.5 hours after we got there (I had dessert only which arrived about 30 minutes before everyone else's food).