The scenario: Working with one of our biggest vendors on the product that all of our techs (and several of our big clients) use every day on an annoying bug related to virus alert generation, I had to nudge our rep this morning because it’d been a week since any activity took place on the ticket other than a note that “this has been escalated to a feature specialist, you should receive an update shortly.”

By the by, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve received that bit of tech support boilerplate then I could afford to take both of my girlfriends out to a very nice dinner, each. I’m in the habit lately of updating tickets solely to ask, “Is it SHORTLY yet?”

Anyway. Our rep emailed back to say that he’d escalated us to the head of support, and that if I didn’t get some kind of response by the end of the day, I should notify him. Okay, great. I hate feeling like I have to play the squeaky wheel game, but at this point I just want the situation resolved. (For the curious: The antivirus system is detecting a false-positive “virus” file and generating two alerts into the system every two minutes for that lone file. We have to clear out thousands of alerts every day from the file… which, of course, I’ve left in place so the tech support guys can look at it!)

Ten minutes ago I took a phone call from their support staff. No, he wasn’t on the phone to help me with the problem. He called to tell me that someone’s looking into the problem and that I’ll receive an update via email when things are resolved.

Well then.

So, I was contacted “by the end of the day,” considering that they’re on East Coast time and it’s coming up on 5pm there. Mission Accomplished. On the other hand… I just received the verbal equivalent of the email boilerplate!

Do you ever get the feeling that you were being placated… badly?

This is the pattern of sound in my home right this minute. I’m not there now, but I know that the beeping continues because, it turns out, we don’t have any 9V batteries in stock. I’ll be hitting the store during lunch, indeed, so that when I eventually get home I can do something about the smoke alarm at the top of the upper stairway.

The one that woke me up at about one-thirty and interrupted my sleep many times until my alarm finally went off, that is. (I’d also like to thank the waste management service for the nearby apartment complex for emptying their dumpster at quarter ’til six in the A.M. Rock on with your bad, noisy selves.)

Am I tired? Oh yes, yes I am tired. It’s going to be a long, long day. The only “arrr“s you’ll be hearing from me will be growls of frustration…

I submitted these pics to the English Fail Blog, but given how lousy of a camera my phone turned out to be, I’m not surprised that they weren’t accepted. In the interests of sharing, however, I put the pics into my own gallery.

First up: If you’re going to make a cheap knock-off (**) of a cheap and silly bumper sticker, you should at least get the spelling right…

And then: Over the years, TriMet went from a “rear doors are opened by the driver” to a “rear doors are pushed open by the riders when the light turns green” system. Some of the older buses, however, don’t support the push-to-open trick. Thus we have new signage for old buses. Too bad nobody at TriMet knows how to proofread…

This little exercise has taught me something, though. I clearly need to own a real camera again.

(** – According to this eBay posting, what we’re seeing is “the original printing…from the 80′s.” Uh huh. Sure it is.)

I’m not even certain that the only download of the Genesis mix from Friday actually involved a live human being, given that the hostname in the logs doesn’t look particularly legitimate. My only problem with this theory is that I’m not sure how a robot would click on the audio player widget. I could be wrong, of course, and the sole listener is certainly welcome to chime in.

So. Do I bother cranking out the other thirteen if nobody at all gives a damn?

Here’s why I don’t watch the television news, kids.

“Blah blah blah polls indicate yadda yadda is the whatever hoo-ha, but that may change.”

Oh, no. Do go on.

Are you saying that poll results, or indeed any given state of affairs at this precise moment, aren’t completely static? Is it remotely possible, perhaps, that everything may change, sooner or later? People, unless you’re telling me about the speed of light or the fact that two apples added to two apples gives you four apples, I’m going to operate under the perhaps-misguided belief that the state of the world as relayed by talking heads on a glowing rectangle might, perhaps, be undergoing change nearly all of the time.

Okay, so they’re not really trying to insult my intelligence. (Not this way, anyway.) It’s almost as bad, though: They’re just filling airtime. With X minutes to blabber through and Y amount of data, the average newscaster is going to run out of Y long, long before X comes to a close. Thus we end up with inane drivel such as, “But that may change.”

These, as George Carlin once joked, are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.

If you’re trying to install Windows Vista’s service pack number one, you absolutely positively must have the prerequisite little patches installed first.

Mind you, it’s impossible to tell from the Windows Update display which of the little patches are the prerequisites. They all talk about “performance improvement” and “stability enhancement” and blah blah blee, but none of them say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t install this update then your Vista SP1 installer will simply fail. Silently. Leaving you wondering what the hell you did wrong.”

Cute, Microsoft. Very cute.

Of course, once the 16 little updates are installed and you reboot… then SP1 actually appears in the updater display. Gee. I’m sure glad that I downloaded the standalone installer, all 450 megabytes of it.

The kicker? “Service Pack 1 includes all previously released Windows Vista updates.” So… I had to install all of those updates even though I’m getting all of those updates all over again? Stellar.

I’d better be able to get my games working once this is all over or else I’m going to be a cranky little grey duck.