they haven't gotten any better with time. That said, I never use 'em...

Yes, the pedestrians have the right of way.
But right of way and common sense should not be confused.
Back when I walked to school uphill in the snow barefooted, they taught pedestrian and bicycle safety in schools.

We learned to look both ways before crossing the street and to watch out for oncoming vehicles, because they might not see you or stop.
We learned to YIELD unless it was safe to proceed. Which is still the law.
and we didn't get all-runned over. We knew better. And it wasn't all that complicated.

But you can't turn on the news anymore without hearing of some Einstein who got ran over while crossing the street.
Pedestrians have the right of way all the way to the morgue. Same with DBs on bicycles who own the road because they are saving the planet.


Which leads to the next question, when a genius gets run over by a train, does he or the train have the right of way?

Drivers who have taken Social Distancing to mean leaving 3 car lengths between them at red lights, instead of their usual 2 ..

And they are first in line!

[QUOTE=sammyg2;10852807]
We learned to look both ways before crossing the street and to watch out for oncoming vehicles, because they might not see you or stop.


Yep..same here. But we didn't have cell-phones in those days.
Can't expect a pedestrian to be texting and look both ways all at the same time. :)

When people take video on their phone in NOT landscape.

Tickers on tv news that takes up 20% of the screen.

People who chew with their mouth open. But women who snort when they laugh crack me up.

A friend of mine used to chew ice that way and chunks would fall out.

Fastenal anyone?

Me: "Hey, thank you very much!"
Them: "No worries." (I wasn't worried)
-or-
Them: "Of course." ("Of course" what?)

WTF happened to "You're welcome"? Have the later generations become so entitled and narcissistic that to acknowledge you went out of your way to be polite is just too much for them?

/rantoff

Prepackaged deli meat that is folded on itself more times than a Hattori Hanzo sword, so you can't get a slice out without tearing 5 other slices.

Yeah but I like eating 5 slices at a time so......:p

Especially when the meat is packaged with water to make it extra slippery.

I find there's a lot of Culture to this.

Have been doing IT support for 20 odd years. .Not Tech admin work, or end user stuff. But Backend 3rd line stuff for the Software companies.

When I worked at Novell in Holland, we did follow the sun.
But we worked completely different then the US support center.

in the US all engineers were on a desk with Phone, and they log into the queue.. pick up
work a case.. don't hang up till case is resolved. Hang up and invariably phone would ring right away because customers were all in a queue, on hold for hours.

In Europe, all engineers were on a desk with a phone.. and we looked in our ticket system, monitored a queue where cases would be put by the service desk (call center). We would look at the case, work on it, call the customer if needed for urgent cases..
Kept our hands and mind free to actually work on the case.
Customers would call the service desk.. no queue.. state there need for help.. and be back on their way.. wait for call back if it's urgent. And that call back came. quite quickly



When we got a US customer during Europe follows the sun hours.
US customer ends up with Our call center.. they inform them case is created and we would call back...
US customer states, NO , I'll hold for the engineer.
Then customer service calls one of us.. we answer.
Listen to the case.. And then the fun part :

I would tell US customer,"your direct number on file is xxx. xxx.x.x.xx , is that correct ? yes? ok, Here's the thing, I need to look up a few things, test something.
And I'll call you back on that number in 20 minutes.

Customer : no I'll hold..

No worries, : Don't know how this hold thing here works.. i'll call you in 20 minutes, talk to you then..

And hung up while i could hear the NNOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo.....


Then 15 minutes later.. I call him back with the solution.
And the guy is all amazed

Woow, this is amazing, I've never had anybody call me back
And the solution works..

The dude then usually keeps all his calls for the Midnight hour because well , he was so much better off then sitting on hold all day waiting for engineers.



I've had major escalations with us customers, where printing in a fortune 500 was completely f'ed.. Te case came to me with follow the sun handover.. and the Asiapack engineer after 8 hours gave it to me.. after he got it from US end of their working day.

The Customer IT guy on the other end.. had been called out at his 3AM morning.. called our US team at 8...worked his entire day.. then entire Asiapack day..Then ended up with EMEA..

Again I had similar scenario : Sir, we need to take this offline, We have a copy of your config, there's a corruption and we will get that corruption fixed on our end.
That will take a good 4-5 hours, and I can't work as fast while I have this phone up.
Go to sleep, I will call you back in 4 hours

protest.. yeah na, can't do it..
3 hours later, at 5am US local time...
we uploaded his new config over the still open pcanywhere.
turn on his print server and see the queues empty slowly
Rang him at the agreed 4 hours to let him know he can go back to sleep cause the queues are empty :D


US support can't respond to email because they are hammered by phone
They are hammered by phone because they can't answer their emails.


EU support refuses to stay on the phone so we have time to work
So our phones aren't hammered, and we can respond to emails..


I still see the same in my current job, where US mgmt insists that everybody goes on "bridge calls" at the first sign of some kind of system down...

In Europe we refuse to do that.. and instead we work on the issue, and then call the bridge call if we have questions or have news about the solution...

Stijn, we had that same type of issue with one complex piece of equipment that was a Kodak branded printer, using IBM computers running Windows NT, and Noritsu processors. If we called for tech support during normal work days we got someone in India, and the run around and finally a person not interested in fixing a small issue. I have to assume thy were paid by the hour and productivity was irrelevant. They would have the equipment operator reload the computer OS from scratch, and of course obliterate all the updates and tweaks for the machine.

If we called very late at night, we got right into a Noritsu employee in Japan that was interested in really figuring out the issue and was helpful.

I finally figured out it was the config.sys file with a corrupt file name. It tried to load a file that was in error, and the system did not work right. I built a floppy disc with the proper config.sys and a simple batch file that the system operator could type her own name and it would fix the config.sys in seconds. Re-boot and all is working.

The local machine operators liked to sit on their butts and load the system from scratch and get paid the same as doing real production. The man that signed their paycheck explained to them that the floppy will fix it in seconds. I had to make multiple copies of the floppy because it kept getting "lost".

Total beginning was outsourced to do some pc rollouts at Honeywell Evere..
massive cube farm..

The rest of the team kept loading each pc by hand... installing drivers the works.
I was a noobie.. but hated the repetitive work.. I had come out of a pc clone shop and I was lazy.

So obviously on day one I fabbed up a file server OEM windows build, slapped all the drivers on that sucker and basically walked around with boxes and my flipping multiboot disk.

Got told off by my own company to slow down a bit cause they had specced out 5 months work and i had done about half of it in my first 2 weeks.

To which i say.. Why the hell would you specc out the time.. should have just specced out the work and you could have made 5 months money in 1 and a half with some room to spare.

Sales guy looked at me like I had just invented a lead to gold conversion chemistry.
Next quarter I was sent out to Compaq storage works seminar in Nice France.. with the sales rep for both of us having yielded the best result.

We didn't see much of the Seminar.. we did see a lot of the nice pebble beach in Nice. :P

My PET peeve is having dog threads locked down and made to go to bed.

1.When I go to a news website and it has the "What you need to know right now" box to click on. If it's so important, for God's sake, type it right now, and don't have all this other "not needed" stuff on the website's front page to wade through.
2. Double peeved when the website's "lead" reporter pop up ad comes onto the screen in a smug, caring, yet intelligent pic stating I should sign up for the latest updates on the 5 things you "NEED TO KNOW" from ....... ......
3. Triple peeved when I'm trying to read article and autoplay video comes on.