Category: consumer watch

Sprint PCS needs to run cron jobs more often

Fair warning: this post is pure rant.

I have a Sprint PCS phone that I use as my primary, and only, home phone line. There are tons of reasons why I like this arrangement, which I won't go into here, but I've been a loyal, pay-on-time Sprint customer for several years now. Which is why it was maddeningly frustrating to go to make a call today and get a note that my account had been shut off because I was over my spending limit.
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Gas Pump Buffer Overflow

Random rant: In 1970, Intel produced a memory chip, the first, capable of storing 1 kilobyte of data - a couple of paragraphs of text or so. Today, one can obtain memory chips that store many gigabytes of data - enough to hold entire movies, encyclopedias, and more - for mere hundreds of dollars. So, why is it that when I finish pumping gas at a gas station and hit the "RECEIPT YES" button, the piece of crap machine can't store that one simple keystroke in its input buffer long enough that it doesn't have to ask me 5 seconds later, "RECEIPT? (YES/NO)". It can remember a credit card number, do complex fuel tax calculations, and even tell me about the latest sugar-coated crap I can buy inside, but not that I pressed that button a few seconds ago. It's a scary, scary world we live in, folks. Bah!

Legal Morbid Buckeyes

I went to the Ohio BMV yesterday to get my Indiana driver's license converted to an Ohio driver's license. It went fine, but the "written" test that I had to take was a little bit different than what I remembered from my first time around. For one, the test is now computerized, which, given that I sit in front of a computer for far too many of my waking hours, meant that I picked up on the "subtleties of the interface" quickly.

But the other thing I noticed was how obsessed the test creators seemed to be with death on the roadways. Example: one question displayed a yellow, diamond-shaped sign with a "T" in it. The multiple choice answers were all fairly reasonable except for (D), which said "this sign means that someone was killed by a car at that spot in the road." Ahhh!! Just a few questions later, they displayed another yellow, diamond-shaped sign with a pedestrian crossing symbol on it. Answer (C): "This sign means that someone was killed by a car while crossing the street here." AHHHH! Scary.

Anyway, I passed with a 93 % and got my license. Phew. It makes me wonder if I would have done better on all of those high school Latin tests if they'd been computerized. (And if at least one of the answers could always be eliminated for ludicrous morbidity.) Sona si Latine loqueris.