Category Archives: Issues

The Ethics Of Contact Lists

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So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.

Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.

I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.

I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!

Amazon and GIGO

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I tried to buy a 1.3oz tin of Reuzel Beard Balm from Amazon. Twice they shipped me Blue Pomade. Why?

Because Amazon has a GIGO problem. Check out this snapshot I just took. The wrong one is on the left, the right one is on the right. Look! At! The! Labels!

Amazon will always error out here because they have totally mislabeled the entire stack supply at distribution! So anyone who orders this will get the wrong thing. Thankfully my barber will trade one for the other, so it’s fine. Honestly I should just buy it from my barber. Lesson learned.

Stupid dullard Amazon. You done fucked up now. Morons.

We’re from AT&T, We Don’t Know The Word, “Stop”

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I wrote this letter as a reply to the fifth or sixth sales representative with AT&T. They are attempting to sell us fiber optic data services. I directed them to our Telecom MSP as a professional courtesy, as I do to all sales folk who directly appeal to us. It’s just good business practice, the MSP exists to handle the complexities of telecommunications for us.

Hello,

You’ll be the fifth AT&T sales associate that I have written this to, so here goes… Please direct all sales inquiries for the COMPANY domain to MSP. Person 1 and Person 2 have been CC’ed to this email. Please feel free to share this detail with any other AT&T sales associates who might want to contact us, or not, as we are just forwarding all of this to our Tcom MSP. 

We are now considering AT&T to be harassing us, but since your company doesn’t seem to understand cease and desist, we’ll just keep on sending all of you to our MSP. I would ask to be taken off the list and to “Please Stop”, but AT&T isn’t interested in stop. Perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a clear definition of the word stop.

Here… here’s the definition of stop:

stop |stäp| 

verb (stops, stopping, stopped) 

1 [ no obj. ] (of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen:his laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun | the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared.

• [ with present participle ] cease to perform a specified action or have a specified experience: she stopped giggling | [ with obj. ] :  he stopped work for tea.

• [ with present participle ] abandon a specified practice or habit: I’ve stopped eating meat.

• stop moving or operating: he stopped to look at the view | my watch has stopped.

• (of a bus or train) call at a designated place to pick up or let off passengers: main-line trains stop at platform 7.

• Brit. informal stay somewhere for a short time: you’ll have to stop the night.

2 [ with obj. ] cause (an action, process, or event) to come to an end: this harassment has got to be stopped.

• prevent (an action or event) from happening: a security guard was killed trying to stop a raid.

• prevent or dissuade (someone) from continuing in an activity or achieving an aim: a campaign is under way to stop the bombers.

• prevent (someone or something) from performing a specified action or undergoing a specified experience: you can’t stopme fromgetting what I want.

• cause or order to cease moving or operating: he stopped his car by the house |police were given powers to stop and search suspects.

• informal be hit by (a bullet).

• instruct a bank to withhold payment on (a check).

• refuse to supply as usual; withhold or deduct: the union has threatened to stop the supply of minerals.

• Boxing defeat (an opponent) by a knockout: he was stopped in the sixth by Tyson

ORIGIN Old English (for)stoppian‘block up (an aperture)’; related to German stopfen, from late Latin stuppare ‘to stuff.’

Please Stop. 

Please Go Away.

No, We do not want any. Even if we did, we don’t anymore.

Thanks

We’ll keep getting helpful AT&T sales reps until I create a spam filter for the att.net domain and route everything to the trash, which really, I should do out of professional courtesy to AT&T. If it wasn’t for the fact that they at some point could email me about repairs, that would be something I could seriously consider. Alas, I may have to just start ignoring them with my delete key.

Unless they … stop… HA! HA! HA! They don’t know the word, “Stop.”

Puff Datty

Aside

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What a windy day today has turned out to be! Took care of cleaning the CX-5, then going to the gym, and then with Scott’s help picking up around the house and running the vacuum. Next, laundry going apace. After that a trip to Menards for a fluorescent light bulb and a starter. It’s a F14T12CW. Yay for codes. And I’ll have the bummy starter on me, so that should be a simple thing to replace. Of course, now that I’m looking for anything, it’s all gone. The entire county. Sold out. Never heard of it. Never stocked it.

I know this game. It’s called “Might as well just fucking buy it on God Damned Amazon.”

But I love disappointment. So, that’ll keep my Sunday busy.

The Dark Side of USPS Informed Delivery

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Early this morning I got my daily alert from the USPS Informed Delivery site. Pictures of incoming mail.

This mornings haul included a letter from Hettinger & Hettinger Law Firm. Seeing this created instant dread. What could it be? It wasn’t a summons or a subpoena, it wasn’t even certified or return receipt requested. But what could it be?

Oh the dread. My mind worked overtime on this. Sure that someone who had a gauzy level of butthurt decided to take me to task for some unknown transgression and hired a lawyer firm to strongarm me into some sort of seedy compliance with some imagined transgression that was best executed in the most passive aggressive way possible. Because why else would lawyers be sending me mail?

What have I done! I couldn’t think of anything but I’m sure there are enemies galore just beyond the extent of the street lamp, angling for their pound of flesh. Something to make this Retrograde in Pisces really hurt. Something from TPTMNBN, I was almost certain of it. Come back from the darkness with one gnarly tentacle shooting out of the inky blackness of their malevolence.

Turns out it was simply an advertisement of the legal services they offer. That’s it.

Why! What do you know! How did you get my address! So, an entire day of worry and panic, expecting every Sherrif’s cruiser to stop, turn on its lights and pursue me. Because Retrograde is built from fuckery and shenanigans.

I can’t take these scares. Law firms sending me mail! It shaves years off my life expectancy just in stress hormones alone!

So the letter sits on my cutting board in the kitchen. I had to walk away from it. I’ve had a whole day to create exciting vistas of suffering and now all of that must be purged. This is going to take a while.

Bluto’s Lament

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Today has been uniquely stenchy in Kalamazoo. At first I was afraid a woodland creature got into the CX-5, somehow, and started to decompose. Nope. The CX-5 is perfectly fine, it’s the air in this town. It smells disgusting and repugnant.

As I was walking to our AMC my only thought was “Buffalo had it this bad, sometimes. At least in Buffalo if the wind shifted, suddenly, Cheerios.”

It’s not the same stench as Solvay, New York. It’s not that strong, but it is organic rot that froze. If I were a betting man, I’d peg the filthy poisoned dead Kalamazoo River. The entire stream should be a brownfield superfund site.

Why would anyone live here? Oh yeah, that’s right, the streets are paved with gold. I forget sometimes.

Goodbye Twitter

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Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

IMG_2439

So if you click on the link, the only option is to self-censor, basically a specially crafted button to blow up whatever the offensive tweet was. In my case, my heartfelt wish that our current human stain in the White House has a stroke or heart attack. I don’t want to do anything to him, I want him to simply sieze up and die all by himself. Fly into a rage, then grab his chest and drop over stone dead.

So, Twitter took it upon themselves to force me to censor myself. Right after I got this message, I most certainly did click the “Remove” button, which blew up the Tweet. Then I downloaded my Twitter archive, once that was safe, I then deactivated my Twitter account. I would much rather it all get blown up to kingdom come than self-censor myself against the pile of waste sitting behind the Resolute desk.

I don’t really care to discuss the First Amendment ramifications, as I’m absolutely positive that Twitter will hide in the tall grass of their TOS. And that’s actually quite fine. I haven’t used Twitter in years, only logging in to lob gems like this one at the pile of fecal matter with a spray tan. I deleted Facebook, I can delete Twitteriffic too.

What am I missing out on? Nah, nothing lost. Peace of mind gained. Goodbye Twitter.

A Little Tired

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Every day brings me an endless buffeting stream of reminders about how toxic and unpleasant Facebook has become. Early last week one of the apps that I use, Social Fixer for Facebook or maybe it was FB Purity reported to me a laundry list of people who have unfriended me or otherwise disappeared from Facebook.

It might have been the straw that broke the camels back. Or at least contributed to the collapse. Even random pages that are meant to be for cooking, or are supposed to be funny post stories and the top-rated comments are so awful. Almost always there is some babble about Clinton this or that, or Snowflake or Libtard, which are all phrases that I’ve really grown tired seeing.

I once thought that the last bastion of security would be the relative anonymity, or at least the implied carelessness surrounding the emotional response signals that each Facebook story features. But this in itself has become onerous. I am no longer able to just feel like clicking on some sort of reaction on a story is something I can just toss away. Now I have to evaluate the emotional carriage of my emotional signal. If you see something unpleasant, how do you emotionally signal? What if you accidentally laugh, or if the tragedy is wrapped in comedy? What if you see something you are expected to be Sad about, but instead you end up being Angry. Or Wow. Or Thumbs Up.

What does it mean when you learn about a train derailment that killed 100 nuns? Thumbs up? Is that what you react with? And then what happens when people start to measure you for your reaction? Is Wow more appropriate, or wouldn’t Sad be more apt?

Facebook has become a consumer of emotional processing energy. I won’t say that it is an emotional vampire, but I would start to lean in that direction for the comments section on almost every story on Facebook for that. It has become an unwelcome diner at the feast, with its dead little dolls-eyes just staring off into space, with its figurative knife and fork in clenched fists on the table, demanding emotional processing energy. Always something provocative, always selected and wrapped by the pinnacle of artificially manipulative programming known as the Facebook Wall Algorithm. Stories meant to entice you to consume content, and while consuming, stab you in the side and collect the energy you were originally going to use for, well, anything else really. It’s a story designed to get you going, to entice you, to engage you. It’s powered, insidiously, by the very people you know and love, it is the darker side to social networking. We started out doing mutual grooming in a rainforest, and now we have created an entire ecosystem devoted to maximum impact and maximum response in a social context. We’ve used all the energy that we would have used to socialize with each other and channeled it into socializing on a site that manipulates us to squeeze the maximum output from us at all times. And then, monetize that very squeeze.

It’s like being nuzzled by a giant mosquito. While it’s busy at the feast, it injects anti-coagulants and painkillers in an effort to get the host to ignore it is there doing real damage. Facebook is a vampire with a sirens song and an anaesthetic bite. Facebook is a social parasite and it’s almost a perfect one. Designed to be attractive, innocuous, apparently innocent, but manifestly toxic, virulent, and disastrous.

So what is to be done? Facebook still has quite a bit of energy in it’s identity token leverage, you can’t leave because how will you use another site that offered instant gratification because you could “Sign Up” using Facebook, so that once you were signed into Facebook, you effectively had Single Sign On enabled on all those other sites. It made joining services a snap, it makes authentication a snap, and it insidiously leverages the service into your life. You couldn’t leave if you wanted to. You are trapped.

So I won’t quit Facebook. But I have deleted it from my bookmarks and I will delete it from my iPad and my iPhone. The account will dwell, intact and unchanged. I am withdrawing my consent to be squeezed for emotional processing energy. I will no longer process the jobs presented by the emotional response flag system on the Facebook Wall. I will not like something, or be angry, or sad, or wow, or laugh.

This is a matter of self-preservation. Now that people I know are leaving the platform, this seems like a good time to seek out this snuffed campfire path in the road with Facebook. There will be charcoal in the burn ring, there will be seats arrayed around the campfire, but I won’t be sitting in them anymore. I have to see this as an expression of self-care. I have to think of my own emotional processing energy first, to be careful with how I spend it and with whom.

So the things that I write about on Facebook will be posted on this Blog. It won’t likely be long form work, like this, and it won’t be as intimate as some of the things I’ve shared on Facebook, as the blog has a very rudimentary audience control system. Either a post is password protected, or it is public. There are no levels of gray, like there is on Facebook.

I can’t anymore. I give up.

On The Domain?

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At work a funny question came up. Should we put an important user and their super slim executive-style laptop on the Windows Domain or just use a Local Account? There is really only one user who fits this bill, and so we’ll leave that obvious bit out because I don’t include names in any of my blog writing.

The question comes down to reliability. Can we trust that the Windows Domain account will always work? Eh, that’s the 64,000 dollar question, now isn’t it? The user cannot under any circumstances ever see “This laptop cannot form a trust relationship with the selected domain.” error that pops up rarely and irregularly around our Windows Domain.

Obviously the answer is, since it’s Microsoft, apply the KISS Principle. We keep it simple, we keep it a local account, because we simply cannot trust Microsoft at all. Maybe the domain will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe Kerberos will work, maybe it won’t. Right up there with the worthlessness of Windows Domain GPO’s, will they apply? Well, they appear to, but they do nothing in practice. In my experience GPO’s are a mixed bag at best, sometimes they work, like home drives and printers, but sometimes they just bellyflop. We don’t really do much with GPO’s because Microsoft’s technology is so hilariously poor. Roll out software through the Domain? Hah. Never works. Fiddle with settings on the Domain? Never works. Never ever ever works. GPO’s are essentially a crock of shit at best, and a waste of time at worst.

So, if you have a mission critical user on a computer, do you use a Windows Domain? Only if you like putting 2×4’s up against your legs and whacking your ankles with a sledgehammer. Yeah, that’s the level of suffering and agony that is Windows. We’ll skip it, thanks.

I will say, I did briefly consider calling Microsoft Technical Support once a long time ago when we were looking at GPO’s for something in the long ago. But you know, that’s not a serious offer either, and creates way more work and suffering than just skipping the entire thing and declaring that whatever it is simply cannot be done. Not that any requests have actually come in that way, our interest in GPO’s were purely in-department wonderings. One foray into them, they don’t work, spread gasoline on everything and light a match and let it all burn.

It’s been a long time since I wrote this bit, but it still holds true and will for the rest of time. Microsoft is the worst company on Earth and I regret every experience coming into contact with them. I only use their “technology” because I have no other choice. Microsoft rules a kingdom of shit. May they all die in a fire.

So no, we won’t be using a Domain Account.

200 Hours

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The last time I was logged into Facebook was June 9th at 11:45pm. I was scrolling along the wall feed and I distinctly felt ill that I was on Facebook. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t rewarding, it was a chore. More than that, it was an unpleasant chore, and at the time it felt repulsive. The kind of repulsion that makes your stomach go sour, hurk a little and the metallic acid tang at the back of your throat, that sort of raw physical displeasure. I closed the tab, and wrote a little in my journal.

It’s been 200 hours and a few since that moment. I haven’t logged on once since. I don’t feel like I am missing anything, except when I have something to cheer or gripe about. There are a few things that I could have posted on Facebook, and thanks to Yelp, some of that has made its way on to Facebook, but that was automation doing the sharing, not me.

I made a break with Facebook. I’m not going to close anything or remove anything, that would require more exposure to their platform. I simply won’t be there. I’ve got this blog, where I can share things, and of course my journal. Almost everything ends up in the journal anyways, the important things in the blog, and I will leave Facebook and Twitter to the machines, let them suffer it. The universal answer to “Did you see on…?” will default to no. I didn’t see it. I don’t really want to see it, but you’ll show it to me anyways. There may never be freedom, true freedom from Facebook, because it leaks in around the edges and is in the news a lot, so it will become something like a persistent fungal infection. Nothing that actually hurts me, but it makes my toenails ugly. Just leave the socks on.

Facebook, and Google both have contributed to the death of smalltalk. What’s the point of saying anything when nobody believes you and they tell you that you are wrong, up until they read it on the platform and then you hear in a small voice, “Oh, yeah… there it is.” So, whatever. It’s best to just leave everything to the platform, it has in so many ways replaced so much for us. The matter of record, truth, facts, and even basic conversation. The only thing left is to pretend to be a dullard. You don’t know anything, you have nothing to say, and everything is a mystery novelty.

The platform is very interesting. We created something we can’t control, it’s bad for us, but we don’t really care. We’re throwing flowers at Frankenstein’s Monster and celebrating it with daily parades, despite the fact that it rampages and burns down random buildings and causes such conflict and suffering. Hooray for the Monster.

I won’t see it on Facebook. Save your bus fare. Keep whatever it is to yourself. Whats the point of talking about it anyways? All the possible conversations are there, up on that platform, go there, knock yourself out. The Monster loves daisies.